Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS), a leading provider of corporate governance solutions to the global financial community, announced the opening of its annual comment period for its 2013 proxy voting policies. A critical component of ISS’ annual policy formulation process, the comment period allows institutional investors, corporate issuers, and governance market participants to provide feedback on ISS’ policy updates while they are still in draft stage. The comment period runs through October 31 and includes ISS’ U.S. and International policies.
To ensure its voting policies reflect the perspectives of the corporate governance community and represent the collective voice of its institutional clients, ISS gathers broad input each year from institutional clients and market constituents through policy surveys, issue-specific roundtables and this unique open comment period. Survey respondents weighed in on issues ranging from pay for performance and peer group construction to board responsiveness and environmental and social issues. The full results from the survey are posted to ISS’ Policy Gateway.
One area that ISS is considering changing is pay, evaluating realizable pay in say-on-pay shareholder votes. They may take boards to task for letting executives pledge too much stock as collateral for margin accounts.
ISS firmly believes that incorporating multiple views on corporate governance issues is critical for effective policy formulation. This uniquely transparent and collaborative process serves not only to inform ISS proxy voting policies, but also helps to create a higher level of understanding and dialogue across the corporate governance community. ISS developed this process in 2005 and has continued to evolve and improve upon its inclusiveness by adding in-person roundtables with institutional investors, corporate issuers and other market constituents. ISS also posts all comments to its draft policies on its web site.
ISS will release its final 2013 U.S. and International Policy updates on or around November 15 and its Global Policy Summary and Concise Guidelines in December. To participate in ISS’ comment period and learn more about its Policy formulation process, please visit here.
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