Corporate Reporting Practices and Corporate Governance: A Case Study of Tata Consultancy Services Limited

Abstract

Corporate governance is a systematic process by which companies are directed and controlled to ensure that they are managed in the manner that meets stakeholder aspirations. Corporate governance mechanism revolves around seven pillars namely Reporting framework, Board of directors - Responsibilities, Composition of Board of directors, Audit committee, Performance of other statutory officers (Remuneration committee, other committees), Board meetings, Investors’ level of satisfaction, and Whistle blowing mechanism. As the reporting framework is an important component in corporate governance, the study tries to analyze compliance and disclosure of corporate governance requirements as prescribed by various laws and regulations relating to corporate governance by Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Reports and disclosures made by the company are collected from publicly available sources such as Annual Reports and the website of the company. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of corporate governance reporting framework as complied by Tata Consultancy Services Limited. The paper studies and analyzes the annual reports of six years (period 2010-2016) and also the website of the company that not only advocates the voluntary publication of corporate governance information but also stresses its underlying ethos of public accountability and transparency. A customized corporate governance disclosure index is constructed in order to find out a corporate disclosure score that is applicable to the company.  Overall, the extent of governance disclosure is found to be similar across the periods under study. The annual reports or website do not mention anything about employee participation. The highest disclosures are those dealing with management structure and transparency, which are also found to be similar across the periods under study.