An accounting scandal engulfing Japanese conglomerate Toshiba Corp. has exposed how closed corporate culture, still prevalent even at globally well-known companies in the country, plagues corporate governance.
In the country's worst accounting scandal in years, a third-party panel concluded that Toshiba's top management had "pressured" employees to achieve ambitious profit targets, saying that a corporate culture that did not allow subordinates to oppose their bosses was behind the dodgy bookkeeping.
It also criticized the Japanese conglomerate's excessive focus on producing numbers. The panel reported that the firm's "systematic" inflation of profits totaled ¥151.8 billion over nearly seven years.