Corporate Governance Disclosure in Slovak Banks

Effective corporate governance is essential for proper functioning of the banking sector and the economy as a whole. Banks play an important role in the economy by channelling savings and depositors’ funds into activities that support entrepreneurship and help drive economic growth. From this point of view, safety and reliability of banks are key to financial stability, and therefore the way they do business is crucial to economic health. We assume that the significance of the banking sector and of systemically important banks, in particular, should also be reflected in more accurate reporting on corporate governance compared to other banks. The aim of our paper is to examine the compliance of information reported under the current legislation in the Slovak Republic with the principles of the G20/OECD on corporate governance, which were accepted by the Slovak Association of Corporate Governance. Specifically, we focus on those principles that are outlined in Part V. Disclosure and Transparency. Through the research we examine accuracy of reporting in the banks on the Slovak financial market, and subsequently we determine their order. We also compare reporting in systemic and nonsystemic banks, and for the issuers of securities and banks whose securities are not issued on the regulated market in Slovakia. The research is done through Friedman test, Wilcoxon Signed Ranking Test, Kruskal–Wallis test and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance. Our findings indicate that reporting on corporate governance is more accurate in the systemic banks and issuers of securities in comparison with other banks.