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Press Release:
Pitt Addresses Society Members

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

 

FORMER SEC CHAIRMAN PITT ADDRESSES HOUSTON CHAPTER OF THE SOCIETY

Houston, February 2005 — Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt addressed the Houston Chapter of the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals in February, offering some pragmatic advice on how Society members could avoid "becoming the next cautionary tale splayed across the front page of the Wall Street Journal."

Highlights of his remarks are now available online at:

www.governanceprofessionals.org/pitt2-16-05.pdf

Among Mr. Pitt's tips:

  • Companies should assign formal responsibility at the board level for overseeing the company's compliance programs. There's a tendency to lay all requirements of this ilk on audit committees. Consider instead Qualified Legal Compliance Committees, which must have at least one member of the audit committee and two or more independent directors.
  • Companies should seize Sarbanes-Oxley's requirements as an opportunity to gain a performance edge. Information garnered from state of the art controls and compliance efforts has strategic and tactical uses.
  • Executive compensation is a lightning rod issue that is attracting all sorts of attention from regulators, investors and the media, and will remain in the spotlight for the foreseeable future.

The Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals, Inc. (the Society) is a professional association founded in 1946 as the American Society of Corporate Secretaries. Our name was changed in 2005 to reflect the corporate governance role that so many of our members — more than 3,800 corporate attorneys and governance and business executives representing more than 2,500 companies — play in their organizations. The job responsibilities of our members include working with corporate boards of directors and senior management regarding corporate governance, ethics and compliance; assuring issuer compliance with securities regulations and listing requirements; and coordinating activities with shareholders, including proxy voting for the annual meeting of shareholders and negotiation of shareholder proposals.

For inquiries regarding Society communications please call Geoff Loftus, Vice President, at 212-681-2000 or e-mail gloftus@governanceprofessionals.org.

For inquiries regarding Society membership, services and activities, please call 212-681-2000 or visit our website at www.governanceprofessionals.org.


Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals
521 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10175
212-681-2000 - Fax 212-681-2005

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