When the idea of corporate risk management only related to financial risks, it was simple to see where on the org chart responsibility for it should fall. In today’s business world, it’s much more complicated, and regulators have been pushing boards to do more oversight.
Wharton accounting professor Christopher Ittner has been researching the results of these changes: Do they make a real difference to internal behavior or the bottom line, or are companies just going through the motions? In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Ittner talks about who should be monitoring risk, who shouldn’t, and what the right choices can do for a business.
An edited transcript of the interview appears below.