Articles | Compliance Week – Page 283
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Mending the Data Privacy Gaps of the EU Safe Harbor Ruling
Image: Three weeks after Europe’s top court demolished the 15-year-old Safe Harbor Program to transfer personal data from Europe to the United States, thousands of U.S. companies that used the program are still scrambling to fill data privacy gaps. “To lean back and see how things play out is not ...
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How to Worry About M&A Accounting in This Year’s Audit
Image: Merger activity is booming this year. That means plenty of scrutiny from audit firms in the coming year-end audit, since the firms themselves are under PCAOB pressure to be more skeptical of fair value, provisional figures in financial statements, and the like—all crucial to accounting for M&A deals. “Audit ...
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Let’s Change the Way We Talk About Controls
This month’s edition of the GRC Illustrated Series from Compliance Week and OCEG discusses how to address threats to the company while recognizing opportunities. Inside, learn about the integrated approach to an internal control environment that uses proactive, detective, and responsive management actions and controls to achieve principled performance.
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Dueling Views on SEC Enforcement
Image: A chronic dilemma for the SEC Enforcement Division is how best to focus its efforts given resource constraints. Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney had to answer for how those decisions are made during a meeting of the Investment Advisory Committee last week. Despite calls to abolish the “broken windows” approach, ...
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Insurance Companies Face New Scrutiny and Bank-Like Regulation
Image: Insurance firms are in an identity crisis these days: Regulators are treating them like banks. While insurers are trying to resist that, regulators themselves still struggle with how to make sense of the global jumble of rules, requirements, and risk generated by large firms. “There are a lot of ...
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Hosting a Related-Party Transaction About to Get Much Harder
Image: Companies preparing year-end financial disclosures, beware: Auditors will be poring over related-party transactions to make sure those parties don’t get too wild. The new Audit Standard 18 pushed auditors to be more skeptical about transactions, so expect them to push you (and your audit committee) to be more diligent ...
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Hosting a Related-Party Transaction About to Get Much Harder
Image: Companies preparing year-end financial disclosures, beware: Auditors will be poring over related-party transactions to make sure those parties don’t get too wild. The new Audit Standard 18 pushed auditors to be more skeptical about transactions, so expect them to push you (and your audit committee) to be more diligent ...
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Global Tax Overhaul Moves Forward
Slowly but surely, developed nations are closing ranks on an international tax agreement intended to crack down global companies parking profits in low-tax jurisdictions. The OECD issued its final recommendations, Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) plan, earlier this month, which G-20 countries will then implement locally. Nice idea in ...
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New U.K. Law Introduces U.S.-Style Class Actions
Image: A change in British law is bringing American-style class-action lawsuits in cases where companies violate competition laws—something U.S. companies operating in Britain should keep in mind when implementing strategies to reduce antitrust risks. “It’s anticipated that there will be a lot more litigation in English courts going forward because ...
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Year-End Audits: Start Prepping for the Pain
As public companies and their external auditors gear up for the year-end audit cycle, it will likely include some familiar, yet still uncomfortable, conversations. Be ready for close looks at internal control over financial reporting, accounting estimates, and related-party transactions. “You can rest assured auditors are going to be really ...
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Advice Rolls In as SEC Disclosure Review Rolls On
Image: Stop us if you’ve heard this before: The SEC is attempting a comprehensive overhaul of its disclosure regime. This time, however, Chairman Mary Jo White may succeed where many of her predecessors failed. The SEC has numerous ideas to reform Regulation S-X, and no shortage of public comments on ...
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As Companies Reorganize Themselves, Compliance Concerns Demand Consideration
Some of the nation’s best-known companies are redefining themselves. Google created a new holding company to spin off its more exotic interests into separate companies; Alcoa is planning to divide into two public companies; Dell and data storage giant EMC are planning to merge. When companies restructure, no matter the ...
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What the FBI Brings to an FCPA Investigation
Image: Many of the agencies that investigate Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations are the ones you don’t hear about. They stand apart from the Justice Department, discreetly waiting to leap on the next FCPA violator that crosses their path. The best example is the FBI. “The FBI historically has been ...
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World Bank Tries Procurement Reform to Cut Corruption Risk
Sweeping changes to the World Bank’s policies and procedures are afoot that will make the procurement process more consistent and transparent for companies bidding on bank-funded contracts. One big focus: how to reduce bribery and corruption in the procurement process. That will be a mixed bag for compliance officers—more attention ...
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SEC Reform of In-House Trials Gets Lukewarm Reception
Image: Facing lawsuits and other complaints that its administrative proceedings are stacked against defendants, the SEC is mulling changes to give the accused more ability to defend themselves. The proposals have received lukewarm reception at best. “The proposed amendments do not come close to addressing all the issues that administrative ...
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Volkswagen Scandal Puts Yates Memo to the Test
If ever a case of corporate misconduct could drive the Justice Department to follow through on its new promises to prosecute individuals more vigorously, the emissions scandal at Volkswagen is it. Still, finding individual culpability in the case will be difficult, given its focus on surreptitious software. “Figuring out who ...
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SEC Faces New Obstacles in e-Discovery Efforts
As the SEC ferrets out inside traders and Ponzi schemers of the Internet Age, more voices are saying the agency has too much leeway to gather electronic records against investigation targets. Congress is mulling legislation to curb SEC power to get e-mail from Internet service providers; federal judges are applying ...
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Data Security Impasse Overturns Safe Harbor Program
An Austrian student’s displeasure with Facebook has invalidated the longstanding trans-Atlantic Safe Harbor program for international data transfers. That complaint, originally about Facebook’s alleged cooperation in U.S. government spying, has reached the highest court and Europe and overturned 15 years of data privacy rules. Companies are left with few viable ...
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Frustrating Risk With the Right Internal Control Framework
Image: As cyber-security and IT controls rise up the priority list in corporate audits, a new wrinkle is emerging: numerous frameworks (COSO, NIST, CoBIT) used by numerous parties, all trying to build effective control systems. That could lead to painful detours in mapping controls, if compliance executives don’t plan carefully. ...
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Defining Materiality and Sustainability
“Materiality” has long been defined as that financial information which might harm or benefit a shareholder. In modern corporate governance, however, that’s changing. One new proposal seeks to define material information in terms of sustainability for multiple stakeholders, not just shareholders. That has sparked debates over fiduciary duty, corporate personhood, ...