New challenges in reporting on Corporate Governance

As a long-standing matter of public debate, professional concern and academic research, reporting on Corporate Governance (CG) has become central to several CG codes, rules and guidance aimed at improving managers’ accountability, especially after the high-profile corporate scandals and the global financial crisis. As such, nowadays companies are requested to convey to external stakeholders information on CG structures (e.g. board composition, appointment of specific committees or chief officers) as well as on CG mechanisms in place (e.g. executive compensation plans, codes of conduct, risk assessment) (OECD 2019). However, while this increasing regulation worldwide brought to extensive CG disclosures, reporting on CG often appears very technical, fragmented, and disconnected from other corporate disclosures. Starting from these premises, the paper introduces the Special Issue on ‘New challenges in reporting on Corporate Governance’, launched in late 2018 and aimed at promoting the understanding of the antecedents, practices, and consequences of CG reporting in the light of current and emerging challenges. After a brief presentation of the paper included in the Special Issue, the paper underlines that significant efforts shall still be made to increase understanding of how CG information is exchanged within the company to prompt decision making, avoid financial and reputation collapses, and favor systematic value creation. Moreover, new media are challenging the institutionalized forms of corporate external reporting, thus calling for a reconsideration of the communication channels through which information on CG are delivered, as well as collected (e.g. company website and Twitter account). Finally, a convergence process seems on going between internal and external forms of reporting, thus efforts could be made to question how CG information is produced, circulated and used internally by diverse company departments, and to what extent this information is communicated externally.