The consultation period for the independent review led by Sir John Kingman into the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the UK’s accounting regulator and corporate governance watchdog, has just closed. It is intended to help ensure that the FRC’s role and powers are fit for the future and has come after years of accountancy in the media headlines for all the wrong reasons.
In the current debate in the UK around how to achieve better corporate governance at a challenging time and amid changing business and workplace models in the face of technological transformation, there is a concept that is returning to the forefront - ‘social value.’ This week the UK government returned to the Social Value Act of 2013, extending its requirements in central government to ensure all major procurements explicitly evaluate social value where appropriate, rather than just ‘consider’ it. It comes after the Carillion collapse, which offers examples of the failure of governance on every level.
There’s a limit, surely, to how often you can plead an exception to the rule when assessing whether something is fit for purpose. When the ‘rule’: in this case, ‘best practice’ in the running a UK listed business adhering to highly esteemed standards of corporate governance, appears to have been ignored more than once within a few years, it’s time to re-think the components of that best practice.
The accuracy of the numbers in company reports lies at the heart of the corporate governance of any business. Institutional investors and shareholders burnt by unexpected company revelations will have welcomed the news that the UK government has just launched an independent review of the accountancy watchdog the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), to be completed by the end of the year.
It is a little difficult to consider something to be a ‘radical’ idea when it was first proposed seven years ago, in the immediate shadow of the financial crisis – to no avail. A snapshot of business media headlines cast a light on some of the complexities as well as the powerful forces at work that can prevent truly radical ideas from becoming reality.
This week in Britain we celebrated the centenary of women’s suffrage and (some) women getting the vote. For those of us who have been on social media for years it was also a moment to note how things have changed. Whereas Twitter used to be a useful disruptive tool for the relatively few, it is now a place full of megaphones and businesses and government departments too, who are adept at using it to roll out the marketing and the ‘thunderclaps.’ But who could be churlish about cheerleading for the suffragettes in grim grey February?
Boardrooms all over the world are having to come to grips quickly with the wave of female anger that has been unleashed as women unite to tell their stories of sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. The #MeToo on Twitter - representing a ‘hands up’ by those who relayed their experience of sexual predators – was fast followed by #TimesUp after Hollywood came together in a bid to exorcise the sexual workplace ethos now associated with Harvey Weinstein.
