Corporate Accounting

Running head: CORPORATE ACCOUNTING
Corporate Accounting
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
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1CORPORATE ACCOUNTING
Table of Contents
Executive Summary:........................................................................................................................2
A. Corporate governance and its attributes:....................................................................................3
B. Role played by poor corporate governance in the collapse of a number of Australian
companies in early 2000:.................................................................................................................6
C. Corporate governance reforms introduced by the Australian government in response to the
corporate collapses of the early 2000s:............................................................................................8
References:....................................................................................................................................11

2CORPORATE ACCOUNTING
Executive Summary:
For conducting this assignment, different resources like ASX website related to corporate
governance and other scholarly articles have been used for focusing on corporate governance in
Australia. It has been found that the ASX listed organisations have to ensure the presence of
certain attributes for sound corporate governance. Due to the absence of good governance
policies in the past, there have been corporate collapses like HIH Insurance, One Tel and others,
in which corporate governance failure played a significant role. After such collapses, the
Australian government has undertaken a number of reforms to avoid such incidents in future.

3CORPORATE ACCOUNTING
A. Corporate governance and its attributes:
Corporate governance is a group of policies, rules and processes by which an
organisation is controlled and directed. Thus, it primarily includes balancing the interests of the
stakeholders of the organisation like shareholders, suppliers, senior management executives,
government, suppliers and the community (Appuhami and Bhuyan 2015). Moreover, since
corporate governance assists in offering a framework for accomplishing the objectives of an
organisation, it encompasses all spheres of management from internal controls and action plans
to corporate disclosure and performance measurement. The board of directors plays a crucial role
in corporate governance, since they could have significant ramifications for equity valuation.
Therefore, sound corporate governance provides the employees with a process of alerting the
management as well as the board regarding potential misconduct without any danger of
retribution (Leung and Cooper 2003).
Good corporate governance possesses a number of attributes, which are demonstrated
briefly as follows:
Laying appropriate foundations for oversight and management:
All ASX listed organisations have to disclose the respective roles and obligations of the
management and board and the matters that are reserved to the board expressly and those that are
delegated to the management (Asx.com.au 2019). The board of any listed organisation would be
accountable for providing leadership along with setting strategic goals of the organisation. The
board has to appoint the chairperson and if there is already one, then the board has to appoint the
deputy chairperson and/or senior independent director. The management needs to be accountable