The Advisors' Blog

– Broc Romanek, CompensationStandards.com

We’ve been posting a slew of memos on the new ISS policy updates – and the Glass Lewis policy updates. For example, this memo from Weil Gotshal is quite comprehensive on both.

And here’s an excerpt from this blog by the US Chamber’s “Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness”:

This past summer, the Chamber, in conjunction with NASDAQ, conducted a survey of over 150 companies to see how proxy advice has improved under the new SEC guidance. The results are mixed at best. While many companies have started a continuous dialogue with their investors, communications between companies and advisory firms have ticked up only slightly. There are still significant issues with factual mistakes made by proxy advisor firms and companies’ ability to fix them and communicate changes to the market place. It remains unclear whether proponents of shareholder proposals and opposing director slates are clients of advisory firms. One of the surveys most troubling finding is that companies which suspected a conflict of interest at a proxy advisory firm found one over 40 percent of the time. Lastly, despite its oversight role, companies were not reporting issues to the SEC.