The ‘Centro case’ confirmed that each individual director is responsible for financial governance and must be able to ‘read and understand’ financial statements. Despite the centrality of director financial literacy to directors duties, practitioner and academic literature have failed to...

Pressure on boards to improve corporate performance and management oversight has led to a series of inquiries and reports advocating governance reform. These reports largely reflect an agency perspective of governance and seek to ensure greater board independence from and control of management....

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore why different directors feel different levels of accountability toward board tasks. Design/methodology/approach: The paper employs a reflexive three wave data and analysis process culminating in a rich data set of 49 interviews with Australian...