Corporate Governance e organismi di controllo nelle imprese quotate italiane. Alcune riflessioni

The main aim of this paper is to critically review the actual control systems in the corporate governance of Italian listed firms. In fact, also taking cue from recent defaults of some Italian listed companies, we noticed that the increasing number of control mechanisms and committees inside and outside Italian firms do not necessarily make the actual firm oversight increase too. In this framework, we tended to consider different forms of controls depending of the stakes that each mechanism or each (internal or external) authority have the mandatory or voluntary duty to oversight. So we found two main kinds of stakes: internal and external to the organization of the company. In the paper, we analysed the relationships among different organisms that laws and practice have contributed to create: for what concerns control authorities serving external stakes we consider the activities of “Collegio Sindacale” and the functions of the Financial External Auditing; for what instead concerns control organizations serving internal stakes we considered the duties of “Comitato per il Controllo Interno” and the activities of the Internal Auditing staff. At the end of the paper we presented our conclusions involving the role of the leader of the firm (the real entrepreneur) in strengthening real powers for the various oversight mechanisms and control organizations, inside the firm but also outside. We guess that control problems also in very important Italian firms find their main center in professional and leadership weakness of the chief, in deploying the culture of control at all levels throughout the company.