Assurance on Corporate Governance Reports in Spain: Towards an Enhanced Accountability or a New Form of Public Relations?

Elies Seguí-Mas, Helena-María Bollas-Araya and Fernando Polo-Garrido
Additional contact information
Elies Seguí-Mas: Centre of Business Management Research (CEGEA), Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Helena-María Bollas-Araya: Faculty of Business Administration and Management (FADE), Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Fernando Polo-Garrido: Centre of Business Management Research (CEGEA), Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain

Administrative Sciences, 2018, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: Financial scandals have highlighted the need for greater corporate transparency. Thus, corporate governance has emerged as an instrument for corporations to fulfil their social responsibility by offering more reliable information to their stakeholders. In this sense, the corporate governance report has become one of the leading mechanisms of business reporting to attend the growing need for reliable information by users. External and independent assurance of corporate governance reports is a tool to reduce potential risk derived from malpractices. However, within the Spanish context, there is a few number of listed companies who assure their corporate governance reports, and some of them have been shaken by corporate malpractices and financial scandals. This work tries to offer a critical appraisal of current corporate governance of assurance statements in Spain, developing a research strategy based on the case-study. Thus, by analysing assurance on corporate governance reports in three Spanish listed companies, we identify strengths and weaknesses of an unusual assurance process. Obviously, because of the recent scandals occurred in the analysed companies, we raise a particular concern about the potential managerial capture of this activity. Without real changes in governance mechanisms, the corporate governance assurance could amount to little more than a public relations activity.

Keywords: corporate governance; assurance; quality reporting; case study; content analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/8/3/32/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/8/3/32/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:8:y:2018:i:3:p:32-:d:156444

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().