“…According to Dhaliwal, Naiker & Navissi (2010: 792), financial reporting issues involve high levels of technical details and, hence, a high degree of knowledge of accounting rules are required to recognize critical accounting issues at such high levels of earnings management. Indeed, in line with this conjecture, evidence demonstrates that boards including at least one individual with financial (accounting) expertise are associated with higher financial reporting quality (Dhaliwal et al, 2010;Krishnan & Visvanathan, 2008;Zhang, Zhou & Zhou, 2007 A second potential obstacle a foreign director faces is language (Kassis-Henderson, 2005, 2010Piekkari et al, 2015;Tenzer, Pudelko & Harzing, 2014). Although English seems to be the lingua franca of boards that include a foreign director (Piekkari et al, 2015), language potentially affects the 6 effectiveness of the board in two ways.…”