I was wondering how involved are the Audit Committees in other banks? How much direction does the audit dept receive from the committee?

Requests are mine not my employer

Maria, our audit committee is interested in what's going on, making sure I'm getting support and also hammers home delivery dates on audit issues, but I only speak to the chair once a quarter before the meeting to review the agenda. So from a day to day persepective, they aren't all that involved.

If my audit schedule was way behind, they'd probably be more involved, but we stay pretty much on schedule, so...

We meet quarterly with the Audit Committee but have an open communication with the Committee Chairman at any time. That is, whenever we have an issue that troubles us, we call the chairman and discuss it with him. We have had troubles with responses on loan reviews from some officers and the Audit committee got involved by first sending a letter and then getting with management and calling the officers with the problems. This seemed to improve the response and emphasize the importance of the audit function.

I meet monthly with our Audit Committee which doubles as our Compliance Committee. We meet 12 months out of the year, if there are no outstanding audits to report on at the time (either internal or external), we use that time to talk about various compliance training issues, or do status reports on customer information security, BSA, etc. or just have a question and answer session. Seems like we never run out of things to talk about and the Audit Committee stays very informed of what's going on which is something the examiners like!

Do you belong to a "small" bank? Are your audit committee members Board members also? What is the level of their banking knowledge? If it is "high", how long did it take to reach the level? How did you get them so involved?

I have more questions, do you want me to keep going?

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Requests and opinions are mine not my employer.

I just received a seminar announcement from Professional Bank Services entitled "The Board and the Audit Committee After Enron". I'm hoping to go, along with at least one or two committee members.