Date of Award

Spring 5-11-2019

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

First Advisor

Dr. Stan Tuttle

Scholarship Domain(s)

Scholarship of Discovery

Abstract

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 established the role of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) over financial reporting in public companies. Prior research had demonstrated that the CFO of a company who was a CPA, female, had industry experience, or had prior CFO experience had implications on the quality of the company’s financial reporting. This quantitative study examined the relationship of these characteristics between a newly-hired CFO (N = 93) and the audit committee members (N = 331) in public healthcare companies. The extent to which audit committee members’ characteristics may have influenced a newly-hired CFO to have had the characteristics of CPA designation, female, prior industry experience, or prior CFO experience could have been helpful to public healthcare companies and regulators in determining the composition of audit committees. The public healthcare companies were selected from an archival database where a new CFO was hired during the period between 2012 and 2016. Data was collected from the archival database and from public documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, independent samples t-tests, and regression analyses. The results of the study identified only one statistically significant relationship, prior healthcare experience, between the audit committee members and a newly-hired CFO in a publicly held healthcare company. This statistically significant relationship should be helpful to a board of directors when selecting audit committee members at a public healthcare company.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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