preview

Parmalat's Ethical Bankruptcy

Better Essays
Open Document

Parmalat’s ‘ethical bankruptcy’.
Ethics is about choice and the values that guide us and the standards we use.
Questioning what principles maybe at stake and how we choose or priorities between them. An ethical approach to a problem will enquire about end-results and the route or means we use to achieve these objectives together with the relationship between the two (‘end versus means’).
Corporate Governance can be defined as a proper structure of rules and practices, a reference point to return to where decision making is influenced which invariably helps a company run smoothly reducing confusion, ambiguity and ultimately risk.
Shareholders own a company’s assets; management, overseen by a board of directors, acts as a steward over those …show more content…

Idealistically such a multiple of interdependent gatekeepers acting on business transactions simultaneously, form interlocking shields against wrongdoing.

Corporate Governance and Auditor’s independence.
Auditors are reputational intermediaries that receive a far smaller benefit than do their clients from the operations they certify. Since they share none of the gains and are exposed to a large fraction of the risk in the form of reputational erosion and also legal liability. Corporations however face significant costs when they sack an auditorgatekeeper because the market interprets the decision as a signal of hidden problems within the company. So they can credibly offer a safeguarding key service to investors and creditors even though they are paid by companies.
Growing auditor involvement in non-audit services offered their corporate clients an
‘ace at the table.’ Their clients could now covertly discipline their auditors through the threat of the reduction of the non-audit service income. Corporations could leverage influence because of agency problems concerning their auditors’ incentives. In such situations corporate governance within the audit firm becomes crucial. When internal control is not effective, the problem can be catastrophic as it was for Arthur Anderson in the Enron debacle. The usual corporate

Get Access