In the wake of the past year's reports of numerous corporate misdeeds, relatively few businesses have thought about making substantive voluntary changes in their ways of working. And, among companies that have made changes, the actions are general rather than specific. Those are the findings of “The Enron Enigma: Changing Expectations,” a July 2002 working paper by H.J. Zoffer, dean emeritus and a professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business, and Eugene Fram, J. Warren McClure research professor of marketing at New York's Rochester Institute of Technology.The authors conducted a survey, mailing a brief questionnaire to 2,500 chief financial officers of large companies in the United States and to 2,000 English-speaking CFOs of large European companies. The questions focused on six critical areas in which companies would be likely to take action: internal financial controls; internal and external financial communications; ethics codes and procedures for employees' behavior; relationships with external auditors; relationships with corporate boards of directors; and the composition and scope of responsibility of internal audit or finance committees.Interestingly, ethics code changes are the least reported activity.
