If things go wrong, the audit committee also has a role in ensuring that they are put right – for example if an audit failure seems to be leading to poor, or even deliberately misleading, financial reporting decisions. This can put the committee into an adversarial relationship with both the external auditors and the executive, and audit committees must be ready to accept that role if necessary. The US corporate failures of 2002 point vividly to the importance of this. We believe that failures on that scale will continue to be rare, but audit committees must be capable of tackling the worst. We have drawn up specimen.
