Governance

Governance

The success of any business is highly dependent on how it is governed or how it complies with standards and best business practices.  Our governance advisory services can assist you in identifying  and addressing possible areas of improvement for your business to meet good corporate governance standards.

US’ Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (FIEL) consulting

We can assist you in complying with the financial disclosure and internal control requirements of various regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 for US-based listed companies, and the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law of Japan for Japan-based listed companies (J-SOX). We can also help your audit committee and board of directors establish appropriate corporate governance procedures.

We provide the following assistance:

1. Training relevant personnel for SOX (or J-SOX) implementation
2. Analyzing and documenting internal controls
3. Assessing inherent risk
4. Evaluating potential control gaps
5. Testing existing controls
6. Obtaining line-management sign-off

Governance standards benchmarking

With the objective of assisting our clients to achieve good corporate governance, we can benchmark our clients’ governance policies, procedures and processes with the codes and standards set forth by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and by the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Internal surveys and interviews with relevant personnel, and documents review are the typical tools used for our initial assessment. With the possibility of having concerns or issues identified by our initial assessment, a remedial period is usually set so that such concerns and issues can be addressed by the client. Another assessment is conducted to determine if the concerns raised by the initial assessment have been addressed by the remedial measures taken by the client on its governance policies and actual procedures.

Basel II (Internal Rating Systems Monitoring and Validation) consulting

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued a revised framework that changed the regulatory capital standards for banks in order to make the capital requirements more risk sensitive. In the Philippines, the new capital standards took effect in 2007 and are mandatory requirements for universal banks, commercial banks and their subsidiary banks and quasi-banks. Other banks may also want to leverage best-practice risk management in improving business decisions.

Our team can help you understand and implement the local requirements of Basel II. We will determine if your current systems support Basel II requirements, and identify areas for improvements.

Strategic organizational review

We will work with you to make sure your organization practices good corporate governance. Our methodology, which is based on the comprehensive family business consulting service of Grant Thornton, involves the conduct of diagnostic reviews of organizational and management structure and processes in order to identify and address existing or potential issues. During the review, we will use a scorecard, particularly in identifying possible areas for improvement in your organization’s structure and processes, so that you are able to meet good corporate governance standards.