AUDIT COMMITTEE CHARACTERISTICS OF LISTED CONSUMER GOODS MANUFACTURING COMPANIES IN NIGERIA

The audit committee size is considered to possess different skills, experiences, and expertise, thus enhancing the quality of the financial statements. There are mixed findings regarding the differences of audit committee characteristics among listed consumer goods manufacturing companies in Nigeria. There present study therefore examined audit committee characteristics of listed consumer goods manufacturing. The study adopts expost facto research design whereby data was sourced mainly from the audited annual financial reports of selected consumer goods manufacturing firms on the Nigerian Exchange Group for the period 2004-2022. The population of the study consists of twenty one (21) consumer goods manufacturing firms in Nigeria as at 2024. The sample size of ten (10) consumer goods manufacturing firms in Nigeria was arrived at using purposive sampling technique whereby consumer goods manufacturing firms which have their annual report and accounts readily accessible for the study period were selected. Analytical techniques used in the study consist of both descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics employed include minimum, maximum, mean and standard deviation while Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to test the study objective. PCA was used to examine audit committee characteristics of listed consumer goods manufacturing. Findings from the result of PCA on audit committee characteristics of listed consumer goods manufacturing showed that the first three components explain approximately 72.39% of the total variance in the data: PC1 explains 27.92%, PC2 explains 23.77%, PC3 explains 20.70% This suggests that the first three components capture the majority of the underlying structure in the committee characteristics, making them suitable for further analysis. Based on the findings, the study therefore concluded that there is significant difference in audit committee characteristics of listed consumer goods manufacturing. The study recommends that audit committees should be appropriately sized to ensure that the members can manage their oversight duties effectively without creating unnecessary complexity in decision-making.