A good nominating committee can save a company

IT seems that corporate scandals in Japan are almost as common as the typhoons that lash the country each year.

This past July, the venerable Toshiba was right in the eye of the storm when it transpired that it had overstated its operating profits by 151.8 billion yen (S$1.8 billion) over several years. The accounting irregularities involved top-ranking management.

Independent investigators it hired said that since 2008, the three most recent chief executives had played active roles in inflating the numbers.

The Toshiba scandal is the latest in a string of high-profile financial imbroglios in corporate Japan. In the past decade alone, these have included:

Root cause

Certainly, Japan is not alone in what appears to be systemic accounting fraud - the shadows of Enron and WorldCom in the United States loom large - but it appears that the country's corporate traditions have contributed t…