The Role of the Audit Committee in Improving Voluntary Disclosure “Field Study on Jordanian Insurance Companies"

The audit committee plays a major role in corporate governance regarding the organization’s direction, control, and accountability. As a representative of the board of directors and the main part of the corporate governance mechanism, the audit committee is involved in the organization’s both internal and external audits, internal control, accounting, and financial reporting, regulatory compliance, and risk management. This study aims to provide and explain the relationship between audit committee roles and voluntary disclosure, and how audit committee tries to enhance her role in voluntary disclosure among Jordanian insurance companies listed in Amman stock exchange (24 company). We concentrated on two roles, reviewing accounting policies and risk management used to improve the voluntary disclosure, through questionnaires distributed to all audit committee members in insurance companies (84 members), (75) questionnaire was accepted and used in the pilot analysis of the originally distributed questionnaires at (percentage of 89.3%) through use One-Sample T-Test and verify the validity of this hypothesis, the arithmetic means and standard deviations of the items concerning for the audit committee role we found that these two roles influence the level of voluntary disclosure among insurance companies. audit committee followed specific procedures in reviewing, supervising, and control of the company accounting policies to improve the voluntary disclosure. Moreover, about risk management, the study concluded that the audit committee covers all aspects of the company's operations and sets clear methods for each type of risk and how to deal with them by the voluntary disclosure of the company.