Different things to different people.

• Position: Financial Executives Institute's technical committee tracking issues related to treasury management - Profile: FEI's Committee on Corporate Finance

Long considered one of FEI's major technical committees, the Committee on Corporate Finance (CCF) is regarded by some as an activist and by others as a committee that reaches out to FEI members mainly through its prestigious Treasurers Conference.

Outgoing chairman Jan H. Hommen, executive vice president and CFO of Alcoa, is one who sees the committee as becoming more activist. He cites its recent restructuring into four areas of interest to financial executives: treasury management, benefits, shareholder relations/governance and financial risks.

Rather than getting involved in each issue himself, he reviews the significance of financial issues and trends with his executive committee and then decides whether the issues deserve further attention. At this point, the subcommittees pick up the issues. This, he believes, has made committee members "more involved in CCF's work, instead of standing around as spectators. It gives them an arena in which to express their opinions."

Hommen cites some of these arenas. "We battled with the SEC on the treatment of currency options," he says. "We've taken an active role in pursuing opportunities for funding retiree medical benefits. We've wrestled with the New York Stock Exchange on whether foreign issues should be listed and under what conditions. And we've analyzed the banking crisis of the late 1980s as well as the credit crunch of the early 1990s."

CCF has also closed the investment management bridge, he believes, between itself and the Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets (CIEBA). "We're not the adversaries we were in the past," he says. "They respect our corporate officers position, and we respect their pension officers position."

The incoming chairman of CCF is J. Pedro Reinhard, vice president and treasurer of The Dow Chemical Co. (He takes office July 1, 1993.) He currently chairs the subcommittee on financial risks.

Here's a roundup of major issues the subcommittees have addressed.

* Treasury Management: S. Lawrence Prendergast, vice president and treasurer of AT&T, chairman.

Should foreign companies have ready access to capital here, through listings on the New York Stock Exchange, when U.S. firms do not have similar access abroad? CCF met with Exchange officials to state its concerns about the potential inequities in such listings, particularly whether the disclosure requirements should be different from those for U.S. companies. "This is an issue between the Exchange and the...