In scoping
Corporate & Institutional Boards
Public-company boards, nonprofit boards, pension trustees, university trustees, foundation boards — the private-sector and institutional governance bodies whose decisions produce public consequences. Their published codes routinely promise more than their actual practice delivers.
Where the code on paper and the conduct in the room diverge
- Codes of ethics are published on glossy PDFs and violated in the same quarter.
- Director independence is defined away through technical interpretations of SEC standards.
- Audit committees approve what management presents without the staff to test it.
- ESG disclosures report on policies that exist on paper and nowhere else.
- Pension trustees approve fee structures they cannot explain, to managers whose performance they cannot verify.
- Nonprofit and university boards tolerate related-party transactions that a public-company audit committee would kill.
What TASFGA will track
- Code-vs-conduct audits — published policies tested against observable behavior
- Director-independence ledger — real independence, not technical compliance
- Related-party transaction tracking — especially in nonprofit and pension contexts
- Disclosure quality index — 10-K, proxy, 990, and equivalent filings rated against actual decision records
- Compensation-outcome pairing — pay vs. the metric the pay was supposedly tied to
Why this matters
Corporate and institutional boards make decisions that move markets, fund universities, pay pensions, and deliver (or deny) services. Existing oversight — SEC filings, audit opinions, accreditation reviews — is structurally insufficient for the leverage these bodies hold. The work here is the same as everywhere else: pin down where the code and the practice part ways, put a concrete fix on the table, and come back to confirm it actually took.