Lord Myners at the House of Lords audit enquiry
Posted by Christie Malry on January 19, 2011 at 9:34 am
An interesting tweet from Accountancy Age, who spent yesterday afternoon at the House of Lords debate on audit:
Myners: Professional adviser should be appointed to guide the audit committee and chair on complex risk and technical matters #lordsaudit
Myners, according to his Wikipedia article at least, has been Chairman of Guardian Media Group, Marks and Spencer and Powergen. So, he really ought to be more up to speed with UK corporate governance. Section B of the UK Corporate Governance Code, issued by the Financial Reporting Council, says:
The board and its committees should have the appropriate balance of skills, experience, independence and knowledge of the company to enable them to discharge their respective duties and responsibilities effectively.
...
All directors should receive induction on joining the board and should regularly update and refresh their skills and knowledge.
...
The board should undertake a formal and rigorous annual evaluation of its own performance and that of its committees and individual directors.
So, all audit committees of UK listed companies should already be determining what skills they need. If they identify any skills gaps they must take steps to rectify the shortfall.
There's simply no need for any change in regulation to make this work, just a bit of enforcement of what's already there.
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