Nominating committees are the most difficult issue in corporate governance practices. Since the election (nomination) of directors is a matter that involves personnel rights, and personnel is also a matter that has a great deal to do with compensation, the CEO is still deeply involved in this decision in many companies, especially in Japan where the board of directors is composed of many inside directors. It is not difficult to imagine that there would be resistance to delegating this decision-making authority to independent outside directors. To conclude, even if a nominating committee has been established, it is impossible to know whether the committee is functioning properly without a close examination of the substance of the committee. In order to check whether the nominating committee is functioning properly, the first point to be considered is whether the majority of the members of the committee are independent outside directors, and whether the committee is chaired by an independent outside director. However, a prerequisite for this is that the board of directors must be prepared to accept decisions on director nominations made through a transparent and objective process. This can be thought of as the board of directors itself being operated in a transparent and objective manner. As a measure of this, I would like to examine whether independent outside directors make up the majority of the board of directors. If the board of directors is dominated by inside directors, it is unclear whether the process of nominating directors is carried out in a transparent and objective manner, and it is also unclear whether the board of directors approves the proposed candidates for directors submitted by the nominating committee.
First of all, as shown in the table below, the current status of the nominating committees of all listed companies in Japan is as follows: of the 3,733 companies that submitted corporate governance reports out of the 3,784 companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as of October 1, 2021, 82 companies (2% of the total) are companies with nominating committees under the law. (2% of the total). There were 1,249 companies with audit committees and 2,401 companies with board of corporate auditors, of which 609 companies (49%) and 1,046 companies (44%) had voluntary nominating committees in their respective organizational forms.