With the Corporate Governance Monitor 2020, an annual comparative instrument is provided, which creates a guideline for theoretical and practical discussions on the structuring of corporate governance. This second - even more comprehensive - report analyses 242 capital market-oriented companies in Austria and Germany and focuses in particular on key figures of the Supervisory Board, the remuneration and diversity structure of the Management Board and Supervisory Board, data on the audit of the financial statements and, for the first time, data on the qualifications of supervisory board members. The following points are examples of the results:

• Supervisory board and committees: A large part of the work is done in committees; the number of supervisory board committee meetings has again increased compared to the previous year. There are no substantial differences between Austria and Germany.
• Diversity in management bodies: The median proportion of women is 29%; this shows that the proportion of women on supervisory boards has generally increased. Whereby there is still a need to catch up, especially for smaller companies. The board level presents a clearly different picture: only about 29% of all companies analysed can boast at least 1 woman on the board.
• Age on the supervisory board: The average age is 57 years; that of the chairmen 65 years (in the DAX 30 69 years)! In the year under review, 3%-8% of the supervisory boards were newly appointed, with an average age of 53 years. This indicates that in comparison to the previous year the Supervisory Board was only slightly filled with new younger supervisory board members.
• Remuneration of the supervisory board: According to a modern understanding of the supervisory board, it has an important strategic advisory function in addition to a monitoring function. Adequate remuneration must be paid for the performance of these tasks. At present, the remuneration for the entire supervisory board on the Austrian stock market is only 31.2% of the average remuneration of a member of the management board. While in Germany the ratio of the remuneration of the entire Supervisory Board approaches or even reaches the remuneration of a management board member on the DAX30, in Austria the gap between the remuneration of the management board and the supervisory board is becoming wider.
• Auditors: In both Austria and Germany, the BIG 4 audit firms dominate the market, which is naturally due to the international orientation of capital market-oriented companies. The overall median fee for auditing is at 840 kEUR, with a large difference between Austria (bond issuers 357 kEUR, share issuers 386 kEUR) and Germany (DAX 30 12,838 kEUR and Non DAX 30 932 kEUR).
• Transparency: There are still differences between Germany and Austria in the transparency of remuneration disclosures. The new Shareholder Rights Directive will continue to pose a challenge for transparency in Austrian companies, as information at the individual level is only available to a limited extent. However, considerable improvements can already be seen: 81% of share issuers in Austria already report on an individual level (previous year: 38%), while Austrian bond issuers, at 38%, still have room for improvement.

The complete report can be accessed at www.boardservice.center, öffnet eine externe URL in einem neuen Fenster. The research project is a cooperation between the Institute of Accounting and Auditing and the Board Service Center, öffnet eine externe URL in einem neuen Fenster. It is funded by the B&C Privatstiftung.