“Initiatives For Strengthening Corporate Governance Of The Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group”

Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group has published its “Initiatives for Strengthening Corporate Governance of the Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group” , which is more advanced than other banking groups in various respects. It includes a requirement of one-third independent external directors, a monitoring role for those directors and a description of the board’s role, and provisions about director qualifications,, director training, and the formation of committees for nomination and compensation and also audit functions.

Toshiba’ s Case is Similar to IHI’s in 2007

In 2007 Ishikawa Harima Industries (IHI) experienced large profit overstatements (and subsequent downward revisions) caused by overly-optimistic estimates used in percentage-of-completion accounting for large projects. At the bottom of the link below, you can see IHI’s explanation of the incident, and the actions it took for years afterwards in order to improve its internal controls and accounting:

http://www.ihi.co.jp/csr/english/2011/management/governance.html

Corporate Compliance Insights: ”25 Reasons for Risk Management Failure”

I recently spoke to directors and officers about oversight of risk management by boards of directors. I prepared a list of 25 reasons that risk management failure happens, based on my experience assisting boards, including boards that have failed and boards that cannot afford to fail. Almost all of what follows below is based on real examples. I have never encountered a risk management failure where the board was not at fault, based on what the board said or did, or failed to say or do.

Here are 25 reasons for risk management failure:

PwC’s 2014 Annual Corporate Directors Survey – The Gender Edition

The global discussion about gender diversity on public company boards continues. Despite practices in several countries like the adoption of quotas, and significant efforts undertaken by a number of organizations in the US to increase gender diversity of directors, the number of women serving as directors has not changed significantly over the last six years. (18% of all S&P 500 directors are now female compared to 16% in 20081.