Perspective

Audit Committee Guide

Requirements, oversight responsibilities, and effectiveness strategies

Audit Committee Guide:

Roles and responsibilities of audit committees

As an audit committee member, you have an essential role in contributing to your company’s success. Shareholders rely on your judgments as they make investment decisions. Your fellow board members depend on your insights as they consider the company’s risk landscape. Broader stakeholder groups, including regulators, management, employees, customers, and vendors, look to you to promote a culture of governance and compliance that can protect the company and enable it to thrive.

Your success in meeting this ever-expanding mandate requires a clear understanding of the audit committee’s roles and responsibilities. The latest edition of Deloitte’s Audit Committee Guide is intended to help you with this understanding.

While the guide is focused on requirements for US public companies, much of the content can be leveraged by those serving on nonpublic company audit committees.

How to use this guide

This page can be bookmarked and accessed often for the latest resources regarding audit committee requirements, oversight responsibilities, and strategies for promoting effectiveness. Tools and resources are offered on select topics. Topic-focused questions audit committees can consider asking are found throughout the guide, as well as in a separate PDF that assembles the complete set of questions in one document. A PDF with the complete Audit Committee Guide also can be downloaded. This site and supporting documents will be updated regularly to reflect evolving guidance and leading practices.

Inside Deloitte’s Audit Committee Guide

Requirements

Explore the required structure and composition of the audit committee as well as requirements for charters, independence, ﬁnancial expertise and literacy, and evaluating performance.

Oversight Responsibilities

Dive into the audit committee’s responsibility to oversee ﬁnancial reporting and related internal controls, risk, ethics and compliance, and auditors.

Effectiveness

Discover what leading practices audit committees can consider in preparing for and conducting meetings and in executing their oversight responsibilities.

Inside Deloitte’s Audit Committee Guide

Explore the required structure and composition of the audit committee as well as requirements for charters, independence, ﬁnancial expertise and literacy, and evaluating performance.

Find out more

Dive into the audit committee’s responsibility to oversee ﬁnancial reporting and related internal controls, risk, ethics and compliance, and auditors.

Find out more

Discover what leading practices audit committees can consider in preparing for and conducting meetings and in executing their oversight responsibilities.

Find out more

Related insights

Audit Committee Brief

A monthly email communication that provides audit committee members with corporate governance resources, technical updates, and regulatory outlooks.

On the Audit Committee’s Agenda

A series of periodic audit committee-focused publications that examines topics impacting the audit committee’s responsibilities and priorities.

Audit Committee Practices Report

The 4th edition of the Audit Committee Practices Report, a collaboration between Deloitte’s Center for Board Effectiveness and the Center for Audit Quality, provides insights into the evolving challenges and priorities facing audit committees. It also highlights leading practices for enhancing audit committee meeting effectiveness.

Related insights

Audit Committee Brief

A monthly email communication that provides audit committee members with corporate governance resources, technical updates, and regulatory outlooks.

Find out more

On the Audit Committee’s Agenda

A series of periodic audit committee-focused publications that examines topics impacting the audit committee’s responsibilities and priorities.

Find out more

Audit Committee Practices Report

The third edition of the Audit Committee Practices Report: Common Threads Across Audit Committees, a collaboration between Deloitte's Center for Board Effectiveness and the Center for Audit Quality, provides insight into audit committee priorities, emerging trends, and committee practices.

Find out more