Articles | Compliance Week – Page 278
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SEC nominees in the firing line at Senate hearing
During a nomination hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on March 15, President Obama’s picks to fill vacancies on the Securities and Exchange Commission—Republican Hester Peirce and Democrat Lisa Fairfax—endured more than two hours of questioning that ranged from cordial to confrontational. Enforcing individual liability, ensuring cost-effective rulemaking, and the ...
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GE unveils new approach to investor reporting
GE might seem an unlikely company to take a lead in the push to simplify financial disclosures. A multinational conglomerate with a long list of business lines, its inherent complexity might seem to make it ill-suited for such a task. And yet, GE is aggressively taking the lead, notably with ...
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New law adds to forced labor concerns
In recent weeks, companies have learned—some the hard way—that the government is getting even more serious about human trafficking and forced labor issues. While a new law targets international trade, potentially blocking forbidden products at the U.S. border, an expanding view of joint-employer arrangements is also causing concern for domestic ...
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ArticleThe current state of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield
The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a new compliance framework for the transatlantic transferral of personal information, is almost ready. But the strict data privacy compliance obligations it would impose require a close look now to prevent running afoul of tough data standards that become law later.
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Valeant’s financial restatement begs compliance questions
Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ announced financial restatement raises questions about the drug company’s compliance program and its business model. But it might also serve as an early warning to all publicly listed U.S. companies about the increased room for misjudging the booking of sales once FASB rolls out its new revenue recognition ...
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Scrutinizing hiring practices for FCPA violations
Through recent investigations and enforcement actions, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice have been warning companies to proceed with caution when hiring the relatives of foreign government officials, lest they run afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
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New accounting standard for leases brings numerous compliance concerns
As public companies face a 2019 deadline for a new accounting standard that brings leases onto corporate balance sheets, compliance officers will have to consider a long list of implementation decisions and business implications, says Tammy Whitehouse.
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Pax World’s Joe Keefe on how ESG continues to go mainstream
Image: The 2016 proxy season, building upon trends that emerged from last year’s annual meetings, may prove to be pivotal for investors focused on sustainability, diversity, and environmental issues. “I’ve seen more uptake in the last 18 months than I’ve seen in the previous 17 years,” says Joe Keefe, president ...
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Q&A with Randy Stephens of NAVEX Global: Why third-party due diligence still flummoxes so many companies
Image: Third-party risk continues to be a major concern for executives, and there is no shortage of high-profile compliance failures in recent years. And yet, a recent survey by NAVEX Global of more than 300 ethics and compliance professionals found that 32 percent of their companies don’t evaluate third parties ...
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Proxy season debates may include board scrutiny and short-termism
With proxy season just around the corner, the annual tradition of assessing the mood of investors has begun. On tap, experts say, are demands for improved transparency and communication, better disclosures, and a continuing scrutiny of directors, including how (and how much) they and their C-suite cohorts are compensated. “We ...
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Footnotes of the future: reflections from the Disclosure Initiative
The IASB hears from investors all the time: Financial statement disclosures are too complicated, with too much insignificant detail; unorganized footnotes; and language that reads like a checklist. Seems the board has been listening. Inside, IASB member Gary Kabureck discusses some of the actions the board is taking to improve ...
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Women on U.K. boards: A (partial) success story
Corporate boards across the United Kingdom continue to have low numbers of women on them, suggesting that the struggle to increase board diversity is going slower than planned. But progress is indeed being made, all while raising the difficult questions as to why it is not so easy to build ...
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Putting FINRA’s priorities into practice
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s full court press on addressing emerging and existing risks in the securities industry will continue to intensify in 2016, reinforced by a steady surge in restitution, disciplinary actions, and bars and suspensions over the last five years. What are FINRA’s top regulatory and examination priorities, ...
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ArticleSpain bolsters anti-competition enforcement
Spanish regulators are paying closer attention to anti-competitive behavior across several industries, demonstrated by record fines and enforcement actions reached in 2015. Multinationals with operations in Spain should heed the warning. “We are now seeing that the amount of total fines [is] getting higher and higher,” says Crisanto Perez-Abad of ...
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Accounting standards update brings lease contracts under the spotlight
Image: After years of reports that entities would one day be required to reflect all of their lease obligations on the balance sheet, companies finally have a major new accounting standard to adopt that will bring all but the tiniest assets and liabilities arising from lease contracts onto corporate balance ...
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Gender pay gap reporting in the United Kingdom
The draft regulations on reporting statistics outlining the potential gender pay gap at U.K. companies were published in early February this year, and reactions to the regulations have on the whole been positive, says Jillian Naylor, employment partner at U.K. law firm Linklaters. Inside, CW’s Paul Hodgson provides an in-depth ...
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ArticleIs blockchain technology FinTech’s magic bullet?
Image: Bitcoin is dead; long live blockchain. To be fair, bitcoin, the much-hyped virtual currency, is hardly ready to fade into oblivion. The technology underlying those online exchanges, however, is poised to become the hottest technology to hit the financial world in years, albeit not without significant business and regulatory ...
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Climate change continues to be a disclosure concern
While pundits and true believers on both sides of the environmental fence bicker over climate change, public companies may want to focus their attention on specific developments that could influence their disclosure regime and what they quantify as material information for investors. Questions they should be asking: whether state officials ...
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Compliance lessons from VimpelCom
Image: Ethics, compliance, and audit executives have yet another real-life bribery case to add to their growing library of epic anti-corruption compliance failures—this one resulting in the sixth largest Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement action of all time. “This case demonstrates a failure of internal controls at every turn,” says ...
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Healthcare, ransomware, and effective cyber-security hygiene
Imagine this: You’re a large healthcare provider whose staff is having trouble accessing vital records in your hospital’s computer network. Your IT department begins an immediate investigation and determines the cause to be a malware attack. Worse yet, the attackers are demanding ransom to obtain the decryption key. How do ...