Articles | Compliance Week – Page 279
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Evolving your identity management program: Six cautionary considerations
For compliance professionals in regulated industries, there’s perhaps no greater challenge than identity management. Call it a program, a best practice or simply a daily struggle to account for all users and all the systems to which they have access—identity management is a beast that is tough to tame.
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Q&A: Coping with the speed of change within internal audit
Image: As the world of internal audit is swiftly changing, Doug Anderson, former corporate auditor for Dow Chemical and new managing director for CAE solutions for the Institute of Internal Auditors, speaks to the challenges of helping to drive internal audit to be more forward-looking, how to properly harness the ...
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How internal audit can help drive corporate culture
Traditional notions of audit are focused on verifying quantified data, but can audit provide that same benefit in the ether space of business, verifying the presence or absence of intangible characteristics? The internal audit profession is starting to believe it is possible, and its leaders are calling on audit executives ...
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Q&A with Wolters Kluwer’s Barbara Boehler: What is a “culture of compliance,” anyway?
Image: A term of the moment in regulatory circles is “culture of compliance,” a desire for firms to move beyond check-the-box rules and compliance demands by making good behavior part of their corporate zeitgeist. We spoke to Barbara Boehler, a regulatory compliance expert at Wolters Kluwer, about how to define ...
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Audit committees discuss the growing demand for disclosure
Image: With proxy season just around the corner, audit committees are discussing how to answer growing demand for more disclosure—and whether the demand for more information is really a demand for more robust oversight of auditors. “There is clearly an increase in at least the dialogue that audit committees are ...
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ArticleMitigating third-party risks
Most companies by now understand the escalating risks that third parties pose to their business and are ramping up their third-party risk management efforts accordingly. Even still, many struggle with how to achieve full transparency into the breadth and depth of their third parties, exposing themselves to significant legal and ...
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U.K. ruling expands scope of anti-corruption enforcement
Image: In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the Criminal Division of the U.K. Court of Appeal ruled that bribery of foreign officials was, indeed, illegal prior to 2002, marking a notable victory for the Serious Fraud Office in its escalating battle against bribery and corruption. ““Anybody thinking that prosecution under these pre-Bribery ...
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Volkswagen: A lesson in implicit versus explicit rules and regulations
As uncertainty swirls around what Volkswagen executives knew or did not know about the company’s emissions cheating, this much seems certain: To achieve accountability going forward, Volkswagen executives must commit to creating a corporate culture in which employees and executives follow the same codes of conduct. Inside, guest columnist JTI ...
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Financial world braces for expected credit loss rule
A pending new requirement for how banks should write down the value of troubled loans is providing a ringside seat for those in capital markets who want to understand how or why accounting and auditing are becoming more difficult by the day. FASB met with the Independent Community Bankers of ...
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Compliance lessons in the healthcare sector
When enforcement actions against healthcare or life sciences companies arise, many choose to settle their cases prior to litigation, often resulting in a corporate integrity agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. By carefully scrutinizing these agreements, compliance and audit teams in the healthcare ...
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Failure is not an option
Image: As one of the world’s eight designated Systemically Important Financial Markets Utilities, the Options Clearing Corporation has what some might charitably describe as a heightened compliance profile. But thanks to the work of Chief Compliance Officer Richard Wallace and an enterprise-wide effort to build a world-league compliance program, the ...
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Mitigating auditor liability
Image: Audit committee and external auditors who fail to reasonably carry out their responsibilities increasingly are finding themselves in the crosshairs of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Over the past few years, the staff has really put a lot of focus into financial reporting and auditing enforcement matters. That means ...
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ArticleNASDAQ rule could tug on the ‘golden leash’ of activist directors
So-called “golden leash” arrangements occur when activist shareholders—typically hedge funds—pay a director or board nominee in connection with their service. Calling them “one area where investors may not have complete information,” NASDAQ submitted a rule proposal to the SEC that would require listed companies to disclose these arrangements. A more ...
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SEC, CFTC ‘milestones’ resolve issues with cross-border swaps deals
Consider it regulatory kismet. Independently, on Feb. 10, the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission finalized long-lingering rules and agreements needed to resolve concerns with the international marketplace for derivatives deals. The SEC’s new rules cover foreign swaps dealers who maintain trading desks in the United States, closing a perceived ...
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Regulating the way to equal pay
Image: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission this month proposed two controversial pay equity reporting requirements that effectively would impose burdensome new compensation collection obligations on companies with at least 100 employees, and federal contractors with at least 50 employees, starting in 2017. “This information will assist employers in evaluating their ...
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ArticlePreventing a payment card hack
Point of sales systems are the weak link in the chain when it comes to retail cyber-security. Recent data breaches at a number of prominent companies—including three in January alone—highlight the ever-increasing stakes for any organization responsible for handling customer data. Increasingly this is an issue that a strong compliance ...
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The new VIE evaluation process is here, but what does it really change?
Image: With yet another change in the guidance on when a company needs to consolidate a particular entity onto its balance sheet, all public companies need to walk through a new evaluation process in the first quarter, even if it doesn’t change the outcome. “It is a thicket,” says Adam ...
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Data collection could be key to battling trade-based money laundering
Trade-based money laundering is a common technique for funding terrorist activities through seemingly innocuous trade activity that essentially hides criminal transactions in plain sight. And it will take the combined efforts of U.S. Customs, FinCEN, the Department of Commerce, and port authorities (and their counterparts in other countries) to compile ...
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Fiduciary duty rules poised to redefine an industry
It sounds reasonable enough: hold broker-dealers and investment advisers to a fiduciary standard when they offer investment advice, specifically with retirement plans. Firms, however, fear that pending rules, split between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor, are not in sync and unintended consequences will radically alter traditional ...
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Mitigating export control violations
Image: The U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security is considering proposed rules that, on the one hand, would significantly raise the stakes for companies that run afoul of export control regulations but, on the other hand, bring greater transparency to the enforcement process. “The guidelines generally provide ...