The past few years have not been the best of times for the credibility of the investment industry.

The dotcom boom, followed by the sudden collapse of companies such as Enron in the US and Italy's Parmalat, damaged the reputation not just of auditors, accountants and the corporate executives who ran such firms but the investment professionals, such as stock market analysts, who recommended them.

However, despite the bad publicity attracted by the likes of Wall Street analyst Jack Grubman, who was touting Worldcom even as the shares of the telecoms company were collapsing, there are those in the industry who remain concerned with its ethics and standards.

Members of the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR) have been meeting in Dublin this week to review its strict code of ethics and bring them up to date.

The professional association, which represents some 70,000 investment practitioners worldwide, including 165 in the Republic, sets out standards and guidelines governing issues such as insider trading and research objectivity.

For instance, the AIMR, whose 128 chapters around the world include the Society of Investment Analysts in Ireland, believes there should be complete segregation of investment research from investment banking.

It also believes that analyst compensation should not be in any way tied to investment banking revenues so the industry can avoid a repeat of the situation seen at the height of the dotcom boom when research became biased as brokerages competed to win investment banking business.

However, the AIMR, whose Irish membership includes 66 holders of its chartered financial analyst qualification, does not prohibit analysts from owning shares.

"We believe it better aligns the analyst's interest with the client interest," says AIMR vice-president Mr Jonathan Boersma - although he notes that analysts should not trade differently to their published recommendations except in case of extreme financial crisis.

On the issue of industry jargon - a bugbear for many small investors who are increasingly confused by the plethora of analyst ratings such as "buy", "add" and "accumulate" - Mr Boersma says the association "would rather that, instead of the proliferation of all these different ratings, there was one consistent set".

He believes the industry should adopt three simple ratings, "buy", "sell" and "hold" and leave it at that.

The AIMR is also concerned about wider issues affecting the investment community, such as standards of corporate governance. It believes that investor interests need to be better represented in boardrooms, which tend to be packed full of corporate executives and lacking in diversity.

According to Mr Boersma, who is in Dublin for this week's meeting: "You need more than political independence; you need independence of thought. Boards tend to be full of chief executives of other companies, all of whom think alike."

He believes investment professionals are an untapped resource that might prove useful to companies.

Research carried out by the AIMR on the composition of the boards of 338 of the largest public companies in seven major markets found that only 11 per cent of the 4,500 directorships were filled by people who were identified as private investors or affiliated with an investment firm.

An AIMR taskforce on corporate governance is currently considering the issue of executive pay - another hot topic for investors. Mr Boersma believes that, in many cases, executive pay has become excessive in recent years.

"Some of the compensation packages are absolutely ridiculous. They need to be linked to long-term performance," Mr Boersma says.

The AIMR has also been a long-term advocate of the requirement to expense stock options.