The two major proxy advisory firms, Glass Lewis and ISS, recently issued updates to their U.S. proxy voting guidelines for 2013. These are the yardsticks by which they measure corporate practices to determine how they should recommend institutional shareholders vote their ballots on a host of governance and shareholder proposal topics. As has been the […]
Joseph McCafferty
Posted inFrom the Archive
Warren Heading to Seat on Senate Banking Committee
Wall Street gadfly turned Massachusetts Senator-elect, Elizabeth Warren, will reportedly take a seat on the Senate Banking Committee after she is sworn into office in January, according to reports by Bloomberg and the Boston Globe. While the news was leaked by Democratic aides, Warren has been considered as a likely candidate for a Banking Committee […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Leveraging Data Management to Enable Compliance
Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a Compliance Week editorial roundtable in Philadelphia to discuss leveraging data management to enable compliance in the life sciences industry. The discussion was lively as usual, and Compliance Week will have in-depth coverage of the discussion in a separate article. Let me report some of my own […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
These Elections Are Rigged
As the November elections draw near, there are a lot of things that remind us how imperfect our system of democracy is. Anyone who’s watched TV in a state that’s not Utah is probably at least a little put off by the ad-nauseam ads that insist the other candidate makes unflattering faces, has occasional bad-hair […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Boards Look to Put Their Own Houses in Order
Corporate boards have taken a beating for several high-profile governance failures that have dominated the business news over the last few years. And it’s not just those breathtaking lapses of risk oversight that brought us the financial crisis. That was more than four years ago; if boards haven’t learned from that dark period in business […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Time to Split the Chairman and CEO Jobs
Among the biggest debates in Corporate America is the one raging over whether the chairman and the CEO should wear the same set of pants. The argument against the combined role goes like this: The CEO has too much to do already, someone needs to oversee and advise him or her, and the board needs […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Are Corporate Directors Overpaid?
For all the hand-wringing over CEO pay, we rarely hear much bellyaching from shareholder activists and others about director pay. Based on the silence, I can only conclude that most people think that, in general, board directors deserve what they get paid. What do they get paid? A survey just out from Hay Group finds […]
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
When Clawbacks Attack
Earlier this summer, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told Congress that his $23.1 million pay was “100 percent” on the table for a possible clawback, after the company lost billions of dollars from bad trades. I hope it’s not a nice table; that sounds like it could leave a scratch. The CEO said the decision […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Barnes & Noble’s Options Blunder
Note: Welcome to the first post in the Boards and Governance blog. Boards and Governance will be a regularly occurring blog by Joseph McCafferty, deputy editor of Compliance Week. He’ll cover corporate governance and proxy voting issues, executive compensation, and shareholder activism. He welcomes questions, comments, and statements from readers on corporate governance and shareholder […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
EEOC Issues New Guidance on the Use of Criminal Records
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued updated guidance this week on employer use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions. The guidance clarifies how the use of criminal background records for employees or applicants could violate existing discrimination rules, lays out the distinction between the use of arrest records and conviction records, and examines […]