Managing Director, Financial Reporting Policy

The mandate

The Managing Director will steward financial reporting policy as a living decision system. The appointment is accountable for clear interpretations, consistent application, timely response to new facts and a visible hierarchy between authoritative requirements, approved policy, implementation guidance and local procedures. The role must prevent both uncontrolled local convention and unnecessary central consultation.

The first quarter will assess the policy estate: which documents remain authoritative, where practice has overtaken guidance, what judgments recur without precedent and where exceptions have no expiry. The leader will prioritise subjects by financial consequence, frequency and susceptibility to inconsistent application, then propose a rational publication and retirement programme.

Delegated authority includes approving interpretive guidance, chairing technical forums, requiring policy-conforming correction and deciding when specialist consultation is warranted. The Chief Accounting Officer retains specified significant or novel conclusions. Business decisions, tax positions and assurance opinions remain elsewhere, although the Managing Director must translate their relevant facts into accounting analysis.

Within six months, a searchable decision register and standard issue-paper protocol should be operational. By month twelve, priority policies will have named owners, adoption evidence, exception governance and scheduled reconsideration. Effectiveness will be measured through fewer repeat consultations, earlier escalation of genuinely new issues and consistent outcomes on comparable facts.

The leader must develop technical directors who can reason openly, challenge senior stakeholders and teach principles without hiding behind citations. The permanent legacy is a stronger distributed judgment culture, not a central team that accumulates every difficult question.

What you will own

• Establish a hierarchy and lifecycle for policy, interpretation, implementation guidance, examples, exceptions and retirement.
• Prioritise remediation of stale or conflicting guidance using risk, usage and observed inconsistency evidence.
• Chair a technical-accounting forum that records facts, alternatives, dissent, conclusion and reconsideration events.
• Approve guidance within delegated authority and route reserved matters to the Chief Accounting Officer with a clear recommendation.
• Build a precedent register searchable by principle and decisive fact rather than by confidential entity name.
• Require adoption plans and evidence when new or amended policy changes recognition, measurement, presentation or controls.
• Measure consultation quality, repeat questions, time to decision and consistency across analogous cases.
• Develop technical leaders through paper review, chaired cases, teaching assignments and calibrated decision delegation.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate enterprise ownership of an accounting-policy function under US GAAP, IFRS or both.
• Provide an example of retiring established guidance because facts, standards or implementation experience had changed.
• Show how you designed useful precedent without allowing superficially similar cases to bypass fresh fact analysis.
• Evidence personally authored positions on novel matters and effective presentation to senior governance.
• Describe how you controlled policy exceptions and prevented temporary relief from becoming permanent practice.
• Quantify improvement in consultation timing, repeat questions or consistency after a policy operating-model change.
• Show a record of developing technical accountants into credible decision leaders.

Working terms and boundaries

• This is a full-time permanent role with authority over policy governance within formally delegated limits.
• The Managing Director does not own commercial, tax or legal decisions and does not issue independent assurance.
• Incentives reward adoption quality, precedent usefulness and talent depth, not the number or length of policies published.
• Hybrid work requires in-person attendance for major technical forums and selected executive governance.
• Prior assurance relationships, standard-setting roles and financial interests require independence review before access.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 9 October 2026. Mandate reference FNA-PER-2026-CHI-21.