La valeur (incertaine) des classements de régie d'entreprise

Depuis plusieurs années, de nombreuses organisations se livrent à des classements des entreprises en fonction de la qualité de leur régie d'entreprise. Certaines de ces organisations font manifestement de bonnes affaires avec cette activité. Récemment, cependant, des chercheurs de Stanford ont jeté un pavé dans la mare avec une étude qui remet en cause la valeur de tels classements. En effet, l'étude de Daines, Gow et Larker intitulée Rating the Ratings: How Good Are Commercial Governance Ratings? est critique des classements réalisés par les entreprises commerciales:

Proxy advisory and corporate governance rating firms play an increasingly important role in U.S. public markets. Proxy advisory firms provide voting recommendations to shareholders on proxy proposals and sometimes take an active role persuading management to change governance arrangements. Corporate governance rating firms provide indices to evaluate the effectiveness of a firm's governance and claim to be able to predict future performance, risk, and undesirable outcomes such as accounting restatements and shareholder litigation. We examine these claims for the commercial corporate governance ratings produced for 2005 by Audit Integrity, RiskMetrics (previously Institutional Shareholder Services), GovernanceMetrics International, and The Corporate Library. Our results indicate that the level of predictive validity for these ratings are well below the threshold necessary to support the bold claims made for them by these commercial firms. Moreover, we find no relation between the governance ratings provided by RiskMetrics with either their voting recommendations or the actual votes by shareholders on proxy proposals.

Les investisseurs et les émetteurs devraient donc être plus circonspects face à ces classements...

Agences de notation: rapport d'enquête de la SEC

Je suis à préparer un texte sur le rôle des agences de notation dans la récente crise du crédit pour le 39e Annual Workshop on Commercial and Consumer Law qui aura lieu à l'Université du Manitoba en octobre prochain. Cela m'amène à revoir les travaux que j'avais menés il y a quelques années pour le Capital Markets Institute, lesquels avaient mené à un article publié dans la Revue de droit de McGill.

Évidemment, je ne peux que constater la grande effervescence du côté américain, comme l'ont démontré les commentaires précédents de Ivan. Cette effervescence contraste certainement avec le calme canadien. Aujourd'hui, un nouvel élément s'ajoute avec la publication du Summary Report of Issues Identified in the Commission Staff’s Examinations of Select Credit Rating Agencies par le personnel de la Securities and Exchange Commission. Le rapport met en relief des lacunes sur le plan de la divulgation et de la gestion des conflits d'intérêts des agences de notation.

In sum, as described in Section IV of this report, while the rating agencies had different policies, procedures and practices and different issues were identified among the firms examined, the Staff’s examinations revealed that:

• there was a substantial increase in the number and in the complexity of RMBS and CDO deals since 2002, and some of the rating agencies appear to have struggled with the growth;
• significant aspects of the ratings process were not always disclosed;
• policies and procedures for rating RMBS and CDOs can be better documented;
• the rating agencies are implementing new practices with respect to the information provided to them;
• the rating agencies did not always document significant steps in the ratings process -- including the rationale for deviations from their models and for rating committee actions and decisions -- and they did not always document significant participants in the ratings process;
• the surveillance processes used by the rating agencies appear to have been less robust than the processes used for initial ratings;
• issues were identified in the management of conflicts of interest and improvements can be made; and
• the rating agencies’ internal audit processes varied significantly.

Il s'abstient toutefois de formuler des recommandations. On peut le lire ici. À suivre...

Grandeur et misère de la responsabilité sociale de l'entreprise

Très bon article dans le Report on Business Magazine de juillet intitulé The Kindness Corporations. L'article présente les avancées spectaculaires de la responsabilité sociale qui est devenue omniprésente.

Every big company these days professes to have obligations to employees, communities, the environment—and humankind in general—that go well beyond making money. Annual reports, with their yawn-inducing financial statements, have been superceded by earnest CSR and sustainability reports. It's a long way from Milton Friedman, who in 1970 called business supporters of corporate social responsibility "unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society." Would any Top 1000 CEO dare side—in public anyway—with Friedman today? Not likely.

Il questionne toutefois à juste titre dans quel mesure les entreprises ont intégré cette préoccupation à des fins stratégiques, nous encourageant à être vigilant:

We're led to believe that this trend is a good thing, that the evolving role of the corporation puts a more human face on capitalism and renders it more acceptable in parts of the world where it's still suspect. Yet the crux of Friedman's argument—he called CSR "a fundamentally subversive doctrine"—is as salient today as it was four decades ago, if not more so. When corporations take on a social role, often at the urging of elected officials themselves, it relieves governments of their responsibilities to mediate social demands. It removes policy-making from its proper forum. Put plainly, CSR is undemocratic.

It is also naive. Corporations, no matter how virtuous they claim to be, still have a hierarchy of self-interest. Practitioners of CSR may claim to attend to a "triple bottom line"—putting economic, social and environmental objectives on equal footing. But who really believes that profits, short-term ones at that, still do not take precedence in boardroom decisions?

Comme le dit l'adage, nous ne pouvons être contre la vertu. Cependant, il faut s'assurer que la rhétorique vertueuse concorde avec la réalité...