Market Participants Encouraged to Weigh in on Draft Policies
Rockville, MD; October 21, 2013 – Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS), a leading provider of corporate governance solutions to the global financial community,today announced the opening of its annual comment period for its 2014 proxy voting guidelines. 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 still in draft form.
This year’s comment period runs through Nov. 4, 2013, and applies to both ISS’ U.S. and International proxy voting guidelines. To ensure transparency, ISS posts all comments to its proposed policy updates on its Web site unless otherwise requested in the body of the e-mail submission. To participate in ISS’ comment period and learn more about its policy formulation process, please click here.
ISS gathers broad input each year from institutions and market constituents through policy surveys, issue-specific roundtables, and this open-comment period to ensure its voting guidelines reflect the perspectives of the corporate governance community and represent the collective voice of its institutional investor clients. This year, survey respondents weighed in on issues ranging from board responsiveness and director tenure to capital authorizations and issuances to equity plan evaluation.
ISS firmly believes that incorporating multiple views on corporate governance issues is critical for effective policy formulation. This transparent and collaborative process serves not only to inform ISS’ proxy voting guidelines, but also helps to create a higher level of understanding and dialogue across the corporate governance community. ISS continues to evolve and improve upon its policy development process by adding regional market roundtables and outreach with institutional investors, corporate directors, corporate issuers and other market constituents.
ISS will release its final 2014 U.S. and International Voting Policy updates during the week of November 18 and its Global Policy Summary and Concise Guidelines in December.
