Corporate Social Responsibility in Credit Rating Agencies: How to Manage Areas of Conflict and Conflicts of Interest in a Responsible Way

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been an intriguing concept in almost every aspect of business life. In recent years, there has been a heated debate around this concept, especially within the global credit rating agency (CRA) industry, primarily because of recent corporate scandals and the global financial crisis. The current business model ("issuer-pays") of global CRAs inevitably creates some crucial areas of conflict and conflicts of interest that are likely to provoke agencies to value profits over the quality of ratings. In this paper, it is argued that CRAs can eliminate, or at least manage, potential conflicts of interest in a responsible way by implementing true corporate social responsibility initiatives and self-regulating mechanisms. In other words, although the current situation shows that managing conflicts of interest is quite difficult, CRAs have an important role and, if they apply some strategic solutions to such conflicts, they can manage them in a responsible way.