Corporate Governance

I recently posed what I believe is one of the most important unanswered questions in governance on LinkedIn: Who is auditing the governance framework? The responses confirmed two things. First, many practitioners instinctively recognize the gap. Second, there is still remarkably little agreement on who should be responsible for assessing governance effectiveness or even what "effective governance" actually means. That conversation reinforced why I have been asking this question for decades.

The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has identified several areas where fund managers should strengthen their compliance and internal audit functions, despite finding that many firms have those functions broadly well organized.

Japan has revised the rulebook that shapes corporate governance for its listed companies, but the changes are less about adding new obligations than about changing how companies think about the ones they already have.

Modern governance runs on digital systems, but law is still written as if humans are the only interpreters, creating a growing gap between policy intent and machine execution. Every time statute is translated into software, invisible interpretation occurs, turning ambiguity into operational reality and shifting policymaking into technical layers outside democratic visibility. Legislation-as-code closes that gap by pairing human-readable law with executable logic that can be tested, audited, and simulated before it governs real people, treating policy as infrastructure rather than static text. Early efforts such as New Zealand’s Better Rules initiative show this transition is already underway, and the real challenge is ensuring computational governance remains transparent enough to preserve public trust while modernizing how societies enforce rules.

In a recent LinkedIn post, I posed what I believe is one of the most important questions facing the risk management and internal audit professions today. If risk is defined in ISO 31000 as "the effect of uncertainty on objectives," why don't both professions begin with an organization's Mission Critical Objectives? It seems like an obvious place to start. Yet in most organizations, it isn't.

Australian financial institutions may soon find themselves under stricter governance expectations, but with fewer forms to file. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority released the latest draft of its overhauled governance standard, moving into the final stage of a review that has occupied the regulator for more than a year and generated extensive debate across banking, insurance and superannuation.

In a recent LinkedIn post, I argued that the biggest barrier to effective governance is not technology, cost, standards, or even board interest. It is management's reluctance to provide boards with reliable information on uncertainty and performance linked to Mission Critical Objectives (MCOs), combined with boards' reluctance to insist on receiving that information. The reaction to that post reinforced my belief that this issue sits at the center of one of the most important, and least discussed, governance challenges facing organizations today.