I'm listening to the Les Misérables soundtrack while reading the King III code together with it's report. For those of you who don't know what the King III is, don't stress, you're fine--not that it's not helpful. You have to be an accountant or some kind of manager in South Africa to get use out of it. If you're just an investor it's been made easy for you so you don't have to read it, just look up the the SRI index and it'll tell you which companies follow the King III; though it was last updated in 2014 so it's really not very useful at all.
Basically the King III, according to itself, is a code of ethics all entities should apply to their endeavours in South Africa. It's not enforceable by law though like the Americans enforce their code of business ethics (probably because the Americans almost single handedly brought about the GFC in 2008 with the sketchy ethics of their big corporations). If you apply the code, investors like it and trust your company and so invest....that's what they tell me anyway. What IS enforceable by law is that if you don't apply the code, you HAVE to explain why you didn't apply it otherwise auditors will know. We Accountants are quite like detectives, am I right? *cough*
Well my problem with the King III is that it's quite dated (©2009). There's also a lot of man hours involved in terms of managers to ensure they apply the code and a lot of man hours on the part of auditors to ensure there's no pretend application. And well, we have to know the code and it's quite boring and excessively repetitive....
So there we go, now you know something you didn't and I got to sound quite boring but we both got to listen to a bit of the final battle song of the Les Misérables musical so I'd say it's win win. No? Okay just I win.
