By Babajide Komolafe
The Financial Reporting Council, FRC has called on firms to improve integrated Governance Risk and Compliance activities in the operations.
Director, Governance Directorate, FRC, Mr. Titus Osawe, made this call while addressing the press in Lagos on the sidelines of a two day Corporate Governance training on Governance, Risk, Compliance, GRC organised by the Council in conjunction with Planet Governance Advisory Limited.
He explained that the GRC is a course designed to provide the knowledge required to effectively improve integrated GRC activities throughout organisations.
The course provides companies with the tools and techniques they need to understand their obligations, mitigate risk, and have a proper structure in place for when an issue arises.
Osawe stressed that embracing GRC is critical to minimising business failures and also important to attract foreign investment into the country.
He said: “The Nigerian Code of Corporate Governance governance 2018 is a baby of the Financial Reporting Council and the whole essence of corporate governance is doing it right so that whatever entity you are talking about, put simply, outlives its owners.
“There are certain aspects of the code as a document that needs some emphasis and looking at what seems to be happening around entities, failures , both internationally and locally, we thought the issues of governance which is setting structures as it should be properly handled, risk and compliance are things that must shake hands properly.
Talking of risk, as they say, high risk high returns but even in doing that you need to also do something intentionally because you know you are likely to make higher returns but you need to be as careful as possible.
“Compliance is more like on the government side, regulation. So in ensuring that an entity survives,in ensuring the sustainability of an entity, one of the things that you must take care of is that the entity complies with rules, with legislations, with regulations.
“So we thought as part of the key element of corporate governance, governance, risk and compliance needed to be touched for those who are operators because that is where the bubbles burst. That is where the failures occur. That is why we put this together.”