Relazione sulla gestione: il controllo legale

The aim of this paper is a critical analysis of the existing controls and auditing procedures over the “Operating and Financial review” (from now on “Review”) drafted in Italian firms by the Board of Directors. Recently, CNDCEC issued an auditing statement (n. 001) dealing with the compliance judgement over the Review relating to the primary data of the Annual Report. In our view, in fact, this very important source of information has to be controlled (not really audited) by another oversight board, i.e. the Collegio Sindacale and this due to many reasons involving the particular characteristics of the information that the Board of Directors intends to communicate through the issuance of its Review. That is a descriptive paper providing mainly non quantitative information and – among the quantitative ones – non financial data, including expectations about the internal and external (environmental, social, economic) situation of the firm. The ordinary way of working audit firms follow, pursues the objective of controlling the Review only for the few parts of it referring to financial data derived from accounting systems: for all other information, they probably cannot provide a professional view to satisfy the informative needs of the users of the annual financial report. For these arguments, we believe that many parts of the content of the Review has to be supervised – and formally noted in its annual report – by the board of statutory auditors of the firm, the “Collegio Sindacale”

Dalla socialità dell'impresa all'impresa sociale

In the italian economical context, not for profit (NFP) organizations have always had a particular importance. The main issue of this book concerns the social role of this particular way of producing goods and/or services, expecially if compared to ordinary way of having business: the for profit productions. The social role of NFP organizations, in fact, has contributed to the law innovation dealing with social firms ("impresa sociale") but not only the NFPs play a social role; according to the author, even for profit firms plays - and has always played - a very important social importance, expecially because they have employee (and give them earnings necessary in order to live and mantain their own family) and expecially because the nature of the firm is to produce goods and/or services that somebody need. The way is different between NFP and for profit entities, but the social scope is the same

LA QUALITÀ DELLA REVISIONE INTERNA IN ITALIA. PRIMI RISULTATI DI UN’INDAGINE

As themes relating to ‘corporate governance’ deal with a number of corporate control bodies, we investigate one of the most important actors in the internal control design: the internal auditing. This function has been assuming increasing importance during recent years and this paper investigates the contribution of the activities of this function to effective corporate management of major Italian firms. Quantitative proxies about audit effectiveness are determined based on variables that describe the operational aspects of the internal auditing function (e.g. ageing of the function, existence of performance measurement programs, type of activities etc.). These proxies are then used to create a comprehensive index of internal auditing quality which providdes an overview of the status of the internal auditing in Italy as well as indicating areas of future possible development of this function

L'esercizio dell'internal audit

La funzione di revisione interna può costituire – ove dotata di un alto grado di commitment del vertice aziendale – uno degli elementi chiave del successo delle aziende sia per quanto concerne la tempestiva e precisa assurance dei sistemi di controllo in essere rispetto ai desiderata del top management, sia – e, diremmo noi, soprattutto – per quanto concerne la capacità e l’autorevolezza (che essa deve peraltro guadagnarsi sul campo) nella cosiddetta “consulenza interna” in materia di punti di controllo all’interno dei processi aziendali. Questo perché il controllo aziendale ha sempre più abbandonato la sua funzione ispettiva e di verifica (ex post) per assumere una più idonea veste supportava verso il management aziendale e quindi connaturandosi come monitoraggio sistematico delle scelte e delle operatività aziendali. I sistemi di controllo aziendali diminuivano la loro esasperata funzione di “cane da guardia” per assumere quella di concorso alla postulazione degli obiettivi aziendali. L'intento del lavoro è quindi quello di dotare di strumenti logico-operativi i professionisti dell’internal auditing, e di affiancare la recente copiosa trattazione manualistica in argomento con spunti anche didattico-esercitativi utili a meglio comprendere le dinamiche pratiche che questa funzione ha in sé

Dependence of temporal variability of ventricular recovery on myocardial fibrosis. Role of mechanoelectric feedback?

OBJECTIVE: The study was aimed at establishing the effect of factors involved in the expression of mechanoelectric feedback in the heart, such as R-R interval and connective tissue, on time dependent changes in ventricular recovery, as determined at the body surface by beat to beat variability of QRST integral maps (BBV-IM). METHODS: We used 15 normal 6-month-old Wistar rats. In each anesthetized animal, we performed a 3-minute continuous recording of 44. The simultaneous chest ECGs. The signals were interactively processed, 1) to determine mean R-R interval and R-R variability throughout the recording period and 2) to compute QRST integral maps from approximately 50 beats belonging to the end of expiration. Then BBV-IM was calculated and expressed as percentage of beats significantly differing from a template. At sacrifice, the amount of myocardial fibrosis was morphometrically evaluated. RESULTS: R-R interval was 149 ms +/- 4, R-R interval variability 0.008 +/- 0.001 and BBV-IM 30.7% +/- 4.4. Myocardial fibrosis expressed as % volume of left ventricular myocardium, numerical density of fibrotic foci and average cross-sectional area of the foci was 3.0% +/- 0.4, 3.8 +/- 0.6 and 4.4 microns(2)/1000 +/- 0.1 respectively, BB-IM was positively correlated to the % volume of fibrosis (r = 0.83, P < 0.0003). Both measurements were positively correlated to R-R interval (BBV-IM: r = 0.83, P < 0.0001; % volume of fibrosis: r = 0.87, P < 0.001) and negatively correlated to cardiac weights (BBV-IM: r = -0.79, P < 0.0005; % volume of fibrosis: r = -0.75, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Beat to beat changes in ventricular repolarization attributable to mechanoelectric transduction can be detected at the body surface by means of BBV-IM

Experimental Validation of GaN HEMTs Thermal Management by Using Photocurrent Measurements

A major limitation in the performances of AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) is due to self heating effects, connected to the efficiency of heat removal from the device. In this paper, we present a new experimental investigation on the thermal handling capabilities of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs, with conventional and flip-chip bonding. Efficient photocurrent measurements were performed in order to extract directly the channel temperature for all the device configurations. We were able to measure devices realized on sapphire substrate both with conventional and flip-chip bonding, and to compare them with devices on SiC substrate with conventional bonding, demonstrating that flip-chip bonding allows to achieve almost the same results that SiC substrate. Measured results are in good agreement with the presented simulation dat