Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
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On the state level, backdating could involve a breach of fiduciary duty, a waste of corporate assets and even a usurpation of a corporate opportunity.
The principle of fiduciary duty governs directors under state corporate law.
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Apparently when David Cameron had one of his regular meetings with business leaders on Friday, he told the assembled corporate eminences that they had a moral duty to ensure their companies paid the full corporation tax rate, given that the government has been cutting that rate and continues to do so.
Those who have a vested interest in corporate governance and in public markets have a duty and obligation to reduce cynicism in the eyes of the public.
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The movement for corporate social responsibility is in direct opposition, in such cases, to the movement for better corporate governance, which demands that managers fulfill their fiduciary duty to act in the shareholders' interest or be relieved of their responsibilities.
This is because breaches of fiduciary duty are difficult for clients to prove without a corporate insider or whistleblower providing a roadmap and regulators have been generally ineffectual in ferreting out pension-related wrongdoing.
In his quote, Milton Friedman alludes to the traditional notions of fiduciary duties of corporate officers and other agents like financial advisors that require a strict duty of loyalty to the interests of the principle (the shareholders).
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So companies like Google, whose trademarks and corporate rights are protected by U.S. laws, should consider it a patriotic duty to pay taxes on the billions they earned.
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