In: Finance
How would you differentiate among the legal, governance, and ethical issues?
Legal issues
This deals with actual legal cases that have been filed against the company or pending lawsuits.
The issues being , the legal team needs to constantly identify potential suits , current suits, potential suits to be filed, risk and monetary risk and track them and resolve them with efficacy.
Governance issues
Corporate governance issues are issued which include proper functioning of the board.
This includes:
1. Proper appointment of directors.
2. Employees treatment
3. Constitution of the board
4. Contribution to society
5. Running the company in the right spirit of entrepreneurship.
Ethical issues
Ethical issues faced by the company could be quite different from legal issues.
Legal issues are more to do with following the letter of spirit of the law and ethical issues have more to do with the right and wrong nature of things.
Some examples of ethical issues being:
1. To take a course of business that has environmental ramifications
2. To take a business decision that is harmful to the society.