We investigate the agency costs of corporate ownership structure and the role of audit committees in mitigating their effect. Using China as a laboratory, where audit committees are voluntary, we study the demand for and value relevance of audit committees conditional on the various agency costs of corporate ownership. Audit committees complement existing internal governance systems by reducing...

Academic audit emerged in the UK circa 1990 and is being applied in a growing number of venues across the world. This paper describes the variant, to be called “Education Quality Audit,” applied by Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee (UGC) in the mid 1990s and again 2002. The last section briefly compares this variant with other academic audit lineages and with the direct evaluation of educ...

Introduction During the past decade, demands for eVective quality assessment in primary health care have increased considerably. “The third revolution of medical care” has seen a move towards more rigorous assessment of clinical interventions and increasing calls for more accountability. Although most agree that quality improvement is important there are many views about the best approach to qu...

In modern organizations, Information and Communication Technologies are used to support the organizations’ activities. To manage the quality of the organization processes, audit processes are implemented. Also, the audit processes can aim the quality of ICT systems themselves because their involvement in organization processes. The paper investigates the ways in which a quality management can b...

introduction: pre-operative investigations for emergency surgical patients differ between centers. following established guidelines can reduce unnecessary investigation, cost of treatment and hospital stay. the present audit was carried out to evaluate the condition of doing pre-operative investigations for three common surgical emergencies compared to national institute for health and care exc...

The objective of this investigation was to identify nurses' practice in heath audit. The hermeneutic-dialectic method was used for the analysis. The study was performed in three loci: the internal audit service of a hospital; the external audit service of a private health service buyer, and the state audit service of the public health system (SUS, acronym in Portuguese for Sistema Unico de Saúd...