Abstract:

The World is in a pandemic crisis at the moment, states, multilateral organizations and citizens being in urgent need for strategies to fight, cope with and ease the pandemic as well as to protect their societies and economies during and after this socio-economic crisis. The challenge (and struggle!) is global and huge – for many societies, the current crisis generating the largest turbulences in the environment since the Second World War. As we are all aware, as a result of the CoVid-19 pandemic, things are shifting and fluctuating quickly and the effect, enforceability and interpretation of laws may be affected by future events. As the practice of hindsight becomes emboldened, the “enterprise risk” preparedness of governance may be subjected to a more rigorous scrutiny that is less forgiving than what the law currently requires, boards being advised to anticipate this and take immediate measures. Boards may be considered “scape goats”, therefore they must approach their enterprise risk evaluation. Risks such as business disruption, workforce turmoil and supply chain breakdown, but also risks that are existential in nature (e.g. global economic depression, national political upheaval, environmental/climate change disasters and public health catastrophes) must be taken into consideration. The issue of the quality and relevance of financial-accounting information in a sensitive socio-economic context such as that characterized (and influenced!) by an economic-financial crisis generated by certain turbulences in the socio-economic environment (such as the events generated by the CoVid-19 pandemic, events that are unfolding right now, under our eyes) is a topic of actuality and interest in the context in which the financial-accounting information largely bases the economic decisions of the users, and its quality is increasingly questioned in the context of an effective corporate governance imposed on companies around the world. Therefore, the emphasis on governance quality has expanded exponentially over the last two decades, corporate governance reform becoming a crucial global issue. Managing resources at the level of the economic entity and not only, including the resource represented by information, is extremely important in order to mitigate the effects of this global financial crisis; all the more so since the studies carried out on the causes that generated the global financial crisis in 2008, as well as the carried out research in the specialty literature that show how to manage the resources during the crisis period are current consequences of the economic life around the world. The recommendations set forth in this paper do not comprise an unequivocal statement of law, but instead represent the results of our exploratory and observation research, respectively our best interpretation of where things stand as of the date of publication.