Governance societaria e responsabilità amministrativa degli Enti. Un primo bilancio per le imprese italiane

In business activity, especially when it governs corporate processes, risk analysis remains a crucial theme. Day after day, entrepreneurs and policy makers deal with growing sources of uncertainty. For this reason, an increasing number of specific actions and rules aims to prevent and defend business value from risks and to manage it. Several factors push economic operators, at different levels, to be aware of the importance to adopt precautionary measures against the various sources of risk. In Italy, following the example of the Anglo- American experience of Compliance Programs, specific areas of risk and managerial control received regulatory attention since the Legislative Decree 231/2001. It regulates the possibility that the responsibility of members’ unlawful conduct, designed to set up crimes in the interest or for benefit of the company, in Italy or abroad, is attributable to the firm as a collective body, introducing the principle of "administrative responsibility dependent on crime". Although the application of this decree is continuously evolving, the paper proposes an evaluation of the Organizational, Managerial and Control Models adopted over time by firms, suitable for protecting themselves from this type of crimes. We use an economic and business perspective approach, offering a critical and comparative analysis on the operational practices accrued over more than fifteen years of efforts in terms of dissemination, structure and composition of the related supervisory bodies, and their level of autonomy and independence. The results remark that, at the beginnings, among the listed companies, only a small number, mostly large and medium-large firms, including banks, securities firms and insurance companies, decided to adopt the 231 Models. For the unlisted companies, the percentage is still small, especially among SMEs where the tendency not to activate such controls is widespread.