Leadership
The New Command-and-Control Center: The Audit Committee
Audit committees are finding they’re handling a lot more risk—and may be more in demand than ever before.
November 20, 2025
Why the Audit Committee Holds More Power
For years, the board audit committee of a manufacturing company spent about 90 minutes in a separate meeting every time they convened. But recently, the meeting had been taking more than four hours.
As corporate risk becomes more, well, risky, the once obscure audit committee is finding that its role has soared in importance, coinciding with an expanded role of the chief financial officer. Gone are the days when the committee’s primary role was to look backwards, overseeing financial reporting and internal controls. Today, according to a recent Korn Ferry survey of 250 CEOs and directors, corporate risk has shot up 65% in just a year, which means these committees must address a variety of high-stakes issues ranging from tariffs to inflation, along with more mundane matters. “The audit committee is driving the most critical agenda items today,” says Jason Waterman, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Global Financial Officers practice.
Indeed, trying to distinguish the audit committee’s scope from the full board’s has become a puzzle for many directors. Is an AI discussion, for example, more about strategy—and therefore best addressed at the board level—or about anticipated risk, in which case it would be the audit committee’s purview? “Many boards don’t have risk committees, so all the risks that have emerged in the past few years fall to the audit committee,” says Tracey Travis, an audit chair who sits on three public company boards. “Our meetings used to be ninety minutes and the most recent one I participated in was four and a half hours.”
Some audit committee meetings cover so much company business that members of other board committees voluntarily sit in on meetings, notes James Stark, senior client partner in the Financial Officers and Industrials practices. “They want to attend to stay up to speed,” he says. In a recent survey conducted by the Center for Audit Quality, 82% of respondents said their board allows non-committee members to attend audit committee meetings.
The changing remit of these directors begs the question of who is best to serve—and lead—the audit committee. While audit chairs obviously need strong accounting backgrounds, “a strong appreciation for enterprise risk in general” is particularly beneficial now, says Matt McGreal, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Global Board Services practice and Director Readiness Institute. Adds Kim Nelson, a current CFO and audit chair: “The expectations and requirements for audit chairs now are significantly more.”
Some experts go further, suggesting that audit-committee members and chairs could be eligible for more compensation, given the time commitment and responsibility they take on. “The things that drive performance or create risk all pass through the audit committee,” Waterman says. To that end, he’s seeing some CFOs looking to “trade up” to higher-profile boards: If they’re going to spend so much time on audit-committee matters, their thinking goes, they might as well do it for an illustrious firm.
Of course, on the flip side, there are plenty of sitting CFOs who would make excellent audit chairs, but can’t handle the current time commitment—which is some 25% greater than that of directors on other committees, experts say. In response, some companies, particularly in industries such as tech, have taken some drastic measures—for instance, reallocating the workload of the audit committees by forming a new risk committee or tech committee. Other firms are maintaining the traditional three-committee structure and are focusing on redefining the skills and traits that audit-committee directors need. After all, “the audit committee is where the most stuff can go wrong,” McGreal says.
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