Board response to majority-supported shareholder proposals. ISS seeks to strengthen accountability of directors who fail to respond to shareholder proposals. In its proposed policy, ISS recommends a "vote against" or "withhold" from the entire board (except new nominees, who should be considered "case-by-case") if the board has failed to respond to a shareholder proposal that was supported by a majority of shareholder votes cast in the previous year. The current ISS policy recommends a "vote against" or "withhold" from the entire board (except new nominees, who should be considered "case-by-case") for failure to respond to a shareholder proposal supported by a majority of:

Management say-on-pay proposals. There has been much criticism of ISS's peer group selection, which is used in its quantitative performance evaluations and which consists of companies based on the company's Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) classification, revenue and market capitalization. ISS is considering changing how it develops each company's peer group by also taking into account the GICS industry group of the company's selected peers (subject to size constraints). The draft policy also adds, as a new factor in the qualitative evaluation of pay-for-performance alignment, a comparison of realizable pay to grant date pay. Finally, the draft policy on say-on-pay proposals adds pledging of shares by executive officers and directors as a new factor that may lead to negative recommendations on say-on-pay votes.

Say on golden parachute proposals. The draft policy on golden parachute proposals:

ISS expects this change would result in it recommending against a greater number of golden parachute proposals.

Environmental and social non-financial performance compensation-related proposals. Noting that it is becoming more common for companies in certain sectors to incorporate environmental and social non-financial performance metrics into executive compensation, ISS's draft policy recommends "vote case-by-case" on proposals that link executive compensation to non-financial environmental and social performance factors. Currently, the general position of the ISS policy is to "generally vote against" such proposals.

The draft policy also replaces the listing of specific social and environmental criteria with a general reference to "sustainability criteria," clarifying that this refers to social and environmental issues.