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Photograph not included in the Web version Stockholders Have Their Say The buzz of conversation mounts as men and women gather at the door-ways, pick up programs, gradually move into the hall and take seats. Old friends lean out over the aisles to greet each other. Chatter reaches its peak and then diminishes as latecomers bustle into their places. Voices hush and all eyes turn to stage front, ex-pectantly. For it's the show of the year-one performance only—and the price of a seat can be in the thousands of dol-lars. It's the annual stockholders meet-ing of United Synergistic Corporation. Call an annual meeting a show? Why, sure. Management is on show. It's a day of reckoning in which Mrs. Hometown with two shares and Mr. Mogul with ten thousand get to see just what has been going on in the executive suite and how these goings on have affected sales and earnings of the corporation as well as the value of the ticket of admission: shares. It's also the opportunity for shareholders to show their stuff to management by 8 registering approval or disapproval through their proxies or direct votes. And, if the audience is a lively and in-volved one, it can be a very exciting show. Typically, the script goes like this: The chairman or president of United Synergistic calls the meeting to order and introduces the directors and impor-tant company officers. He also intro-duces the auditors. Votes are collected for tabulation. In the meantime the chief executive officer will describe the corporation's ups or downs for the past year. He'll detail mergers and acquisi-tions, describe capital outlays and new product breakthroughs. If things are rosy, he'll emphasize the bright spots. If the company has been suffering, he'll do some justifying. And then, just be-fore the results of stockholder voting are announced, he'll throw the meeting open to questions from the floor. This is the climactic point of the meeting. If enough stockholders, no matter how humble their holdings, stand up and let themselves be heard, the annual meeting can be lively the-ater. If stockholders are shy, the meet-ing will be a cut-and-dried lecture presentation, to the relief of the cor-porate officers in the spotlight. When stockholders do ask questions, management does most of the answer-ing. However, stockholders frequently request that they be permitted to ad-dress their questions directly to the auditors or, on other occasions, man-agement may refer questions to the auditors. The Haskins & Sells repre-sentative, for example, may be asked if the Firm received full cooperation from management while making its audit, how frequently the auditors met with the audit committee. Have the auditors checked for inventory obso-lescence? Have the auditors noticed any problems in the collection of ac-counts receivable? More and more stockholders have been asking questions lately, and the information they seek is not always in-cluded in the handsomely packaged annual reports that are issued before these once-a-year conclaves. Even though items are detailed in print, they often must be clarified orally for the stockholders. Stockholder questions typically re-flect the shareholder's own financial interests. When will dividends be in-creased? Can't the company hold costs down better? Was such-and-such an expenditure necessary? Aren't execu-tive salaries too high? Why were bonuses increased? The more sophisti-cated investors might note in the an-nual report that the reason why the company's earnings for the year were lower than expected could be traced to the writeoff of an expensive research program. They could question the method used to account for these costs. Not all questions concern finances, especially with the growth of social
Object Description
Title |
Stockholders have their say |
Author |
Anonymous |
Subject |
Stockholders' meetings -- United States |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 07, (1970 summer), p. 08-10 |
Date-Issued | 1970 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | HSReports_1970_Summer-p8-10e |