ANALYSIS OF THE DISCLOSURE LEVEL OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE ACCORDING TO THE BASEL COMMITTEE’S RECOMMENDATIONS: A STUDY IN BRAZILIAN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC BANKS

Abstract

The disclosure of information  by banks is a current theme that interests supervisory authorities, as well as market participants. This work tries to check the disclosure level of corporate governance of the Brazilian public and private banks, according to the Basel Committee’s recommendations. Additionally, it tries to check if there were differences between the level of disclosure of the private and the public groups of banks that were analyzed. For this, a theoretical revision and documentary research were carried out, analyzing the contents of the information disclosed on the banks’ websites between May and August 2006. The intentional sample was made up of banks listed on the Stock Exchange of São Paulo in May 2006 and that belonged to the ten largest Brazilian conglomerates present in Central Bank of Brazil’s report, ‘50 Maiores Bancos e o Consolidado do Sistema Financeiro Nacional’ (The 50 Largest Banks and the Consolidation of the National Financial System), considered on the date of December 2005. This analysis used eight categories and 34 sub-categories, based upon the recommendations of the corporate governance transparency mentioned in the document ‘Enhancing Corporate Governance for Banking Organisations’ (BCBS, 2006). The chi-squared test was used to give significance to the analyses of secondary data. It was verified that the corporate governance disclosure level was of 46.9%, being 47.8% for the private banks and 45.6% for the public banks. The result showed that no significant differences were verified between the proportion of sub-categories disclosed by the private and public groups. This research also tried to increase the knowledge regarding corporate governance structures of banks that operate in Brazil.