In early May, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) announced that it would vote against four of the five directors on Bank of America’s (BAC) audit committee and the reappointment of its auditor. This announcement, just days before the BAC’s annual meeting, came in the wake of the Federal Reserve Board’s April 28 announcement that BAC would need to suspend its planned dividend increase and stock repurchases because “the banking organization incorrectly reported data used in the calculation of regulatory capital ratios.” According to BAC, the miscalculations related to its acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Through a spokesman, CalSTRS, a $183 billion public pension fund and owner of 31 million shares of BAC, expressed “serious concerns with the fact that this crucial financial metric was overstated for six years. This issue raises new questions about board oversight, risk controls, and the external auditor, specifically given the auditor’s tenure over the entire period.”

CalSTRS and BAC are just an example of institutional investors’ increasing involvement in corporate oversight. According to “Are Institutional Investors Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?” by Ben W. Heineman Jr. (senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Corporate Governance) and Stephen Davis (executive director of Yale University’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance), institutional investors, including public and private pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and foundations, control approximately half of U.S. equity securities. Looking only at the largest U.S. corporations, institutional ownership grew from approximately from 47 percent in 1987 to 73 percent in 2009.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]