STRUCTURING AUDIT COMMITTEES TO ENHANCE VOLUNTARY ETHICS DISCLOSURES IN INDONESIA: A THEORY-OF-COMFORT PERSPECTIVE

This study aims to determine the association between audit committee characteristics and ethics disclosure using the theory of comfort as theoretical lens. The audit committee characteristics investigated are audit committee expertise, frequency of meetings, audit committee size, audit committee tenure, and multiple directorships of audit committee members. Ethics disclosure is measured using a disclosure checklist developed by Persons (2009). This research takes an emerging market, Indonesia, as the context to enable a comparison of the findings with previous literature in developed countries. The sample consists of 85 large-market-capitalization companies (595 observations) listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) in 2014–2020. Panel data regression was used to test the hypothesis. The findings indicate that the level of ethics disclosure on average is 58.16%. The results show that there are three characteristics of audit committees that significantly influence ethics disclosure: audit committee expertise, audit committee size, and frequency of meetings. These factors play a significant role in producing comfort and confidence in the eyes of stakeholders of companies that exercise ethical business practices. This research has important implications regarding how several attributes of audit committees can encourage ethical conduct in business and hence increase ethics disclosure. This study uses a different lens—the theory of comfort—as a theoretical perspective to study audit committee characteristics, which has been scantily applied in accounting and auditing research.