An audit committee is an effective mechanism to support corporate governance on its duties. Turley & Zaman argue that originally the audit committee structure was non mandatory and just was used by a small number of organizations. However, they said that recently this committee has become very popular and many countries have recommended adopting it becoming universal (Turley & Zaman, 2004, p. 306). They give some examples of legislation around the world that has helped to enhance the role of audit committees. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in the US, the report of the Australian Treasury (2002) and the recommendations of the Smith Committee (2003), the Higgs (2003) review in the UK (Turley and Zaman, 2003) and corporation act in Australia (2001) are some examples.

Audit committees play an important role to assess financial statements and to support decision-making process. Governments and different people like shareholder are interested to enhance the credibility of the financial reports. Audit committees have evolved to assess the independent role of auditing within the organization. However, the evolution of auditing and audit committees in recent year has been different events around the world like the collapse of Enron in US. It has changed the current responsibilities and functions of auditing and the perceptions of people about the role of audit committees. As a result, this essay has as objective to evaluate critically the role of audit committee in a company for it we chose the company BHP Billiton as an example.

Can you paraphrase the above paragraph by using professional language?