Mr Paul Appleby, Director of Corporate Enforcement, has today published the Strategy Statement for his Office for the next three years. This Statement identifies the following five key goals, each of which has a number of sub-objectives:
Goal 1 - Encouraging Improved Compliance with the Companies Acts;
Goal 2 - Uncovering Suspected Breaches of Company Law;
Goal 3 - Prosecuting Detected Breaches of the Companies Acts;
Goal 4 - Sanctioning Improper Conduct with respect to Insolvent Companies;
Goal 5 - Providing Quality Services to Internal and External Customers.
In commenting on the Statement, the Director said:
"This Strategy Statement serves a number of purposes, namely:
- to inform ODCE's stakeholders (i.e., company directors, secretaries and managers, their professional advisers and the public at large) of our future work priorities;
- to set benchmarks against which the performance of the Office can be judged in the future;
- to serve as a focal point for collective staff effort in the coming years.
The publication of the Statement marks a new chapter in the development of the Office. We are at the end of our first full year of activity, a period during which substantial staff and other resources were, of necessity, devoted to putting in place a sound foundation on which to base the Office's future operation.
Now that this foundation is in place, it is our intention to focus our resources towards:
improving compliance with the duties and obligations set down by company law and with best practice generally;
taking appropriate action to remedy and/or sanction departures from those duties and obligations.
Given our historical levels of non-compliance with company legislation, together with the widely recognised importance of, and need for, better corporate governance practices, my staff and I are looking forward to the considerable challenge now facing us in delivering long-term improvements in company law compliance standards."
Editor's Note
The Strategy Statement for 2003-2005 is the first such Statement produced by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement since its establishment 14 months ago. The Director's decision to prepare such a Statement was influenced by the growing recognition among public bodies of the necessity to clearly define and set out their long-term strategic objectives.
A copy of the
Strategy Statement is available from the Publications Section of the ODCE website at www.odce.ie/media_publications. A short review of the Office's activity in 2002 is also available from the same source. The Director expects to publish a detailed Annual Report for 2002 by the end of May.
31 January 2003