Report on Secretarial Standards

Parth Haldia

Introduction

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The Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) has also long back introduced some set of rules and norms, which are supplementary to the Companies Act, 1956, called as Secretarial Standardsí and popularly termed as SS.

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ICSI has been the first professional body in the world to start the process of setting Secretarial Standards for integration, harmonization and standardization of corporate secretarial practices. International Federation of Company Secretaries (IFCS), formed with the efforts of ICSI, decided to form an International Secretarial Standards Board which will formulate international secretarial standards to spread good corporate governance discipline across national borders.

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Companies follow diverse secretarial practices and, therefore, there is a need to integrate, harmonize and standardize such practices so as to promote uniformity and consistency. The Standards were always recommendatory in nature. With the growing corporate scenario a need was felt to standardize the secretarial practices so the Standards were thereafter recommended to be made mandatory first somewhere in 2006. Many members of the Institute and big corporate houses were in favour of the SS being made mandatory. Many corporate houses had even started adopting such standards so it was therefore understood that all can therefore adopt and follow the same. Moreover, the members and council wanted the SS to be treated in lines with Accounting Standards (AS) issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). The Institute also was open to recommend the SS to National Advisory Committee on Accounting Standards (NACAS) to examine the Standards.

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Secretarial Standards are the policy documents relating to various aspects of secretarial practices in the corporate sector. These