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Regulators are advising firms to exclude CEOs from their audit committees, based on concerns that CEOs will exert undue influence over audit committee outcomes. However, CEOs also have unique knowledge about the firm and may be a valuable informational asset to audit committees. In this study, we use disclosures of CEO attendance-by-invitation at audit committee meetings to separate CEO involvement on audit committees into two aspects – informational and power. We find that the informational aspect is associated with strong governance and is negatively related to earnings opacity, consistent with CEOs providing useful accounting-related information to audit committees. Hence, this study identifies significant benefits from allowing CEOs to act as informal advisors at audit committee meetings.