Strengthening audit committee effectiveness is a key challenge from a research, regulation and corporate practice perspective. Audit committees’ monitoring role in financial reporting is of great importance for shareholders and other stakeholder groups. This empirical-quantitative study examines overlapping membership in the audit and compensation committees and its impact on financial reporting quality. The analysis covers a sample of German firms listed on the ‘DAX’, ‘TecDAX’ and ‘MDAX’ for the business years 2010–2016 (426 firm-year observations). Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the link between two overlapping variables and financial reporting quality. While the first overlapping variable (proportion of audit committee members who also sit on the compensation committee) contributes positively to accrual quality (as financial reporting quality), no significant results were found for the second overlapping variable (the existence of an independent financial expert as an overlapping member). The main result holds for robustness checks and has major implications in the German two-tier system.