Articles | Compliance Week – Page 283
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As Companies Prep for Proxy Season, No-Action Conundrums Abound
Image: Companies preparing for proxy season face a profound change in how the SEC views the exclusion of shareholder proposals. New guidance on that point is decidedly pro-shareholder and makes a confusing landscape even more so. “This was an early Christmas gift, wrapped up in a bow” for activist investors, ...
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Latest Review of False Claims Act Compliance
Image: The Justice Department has settled a spate of False Claims Act cases with healthcare providers this fall, pointing to several important trends in FCA cases: increased scrutiny on physician payment arrangements, the broadening scope of whistleblowers, and an upsurge in FCA settlement amounts. “Enforcement agencies are aggressively using all ...
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How Mature Is Your Information Governance Function?
Image: Most companies still have much work to do to turn their information governance into “mature” programs, where they can extract insight from their troves of data while minimizing security and privacy risks, according to a new report from the Information Governance Initiative. “To date, very few organizations have taken ...
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Revenue Standard Update: Companies Still Ducking It
Image: Corporate finance departments are playing the silent type right now about how they plan to implement the new revenue recognition standard—which is not quite the amount of disclosure the SEC and others want to see in year-end filings. Those businesses not doing or saying much could be in for ...
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The Key Cyber-Security Question: What Is ‘Reasonable’?
Regulators often say they want “reasonable” precautions when spelling out expectations on cyber-security. But with a plethora of guidance and frameworks to consider, what does that mean—and does “reasonable” depend on industry and company size? A small summit meeting of cyber-security voices debated that question in Boston recently; we have ...
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Parsing the Difference Between GRC & ERM
Image: Lots of executives know the difference between compliance and risk management conceptually. But the difference between “governance, risk, and compliance” and “enterprise risk management”—not so much. This week, we pick apart both acronyms. “Compliance is typically what 90 percent of GRC software does,” says Steven Minsky, CEO of software ...
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Compliance Officers Brace for U.K. Senior Managers Regime
Image: During a panel discussion at Compliance Week’s Europe conference in Brussels last week, compliance executives discussed the broad implications of the new Senior Managers Regime, which makes senior executives personally accountable to regulators for their actions. You’ll also read a candid story of what a run-in with the Financial ...
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Global Investigations in the Modern Era
“Europe” may be a nice short-hand for discussions about global business, but in reality is still 28 individual nations, each with their own laws and customs. Little surprise, then, that in several discussions about internal investigations at the Compliance Week Europe conference, the subject got complicated quickly. We have the ...
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Consequences for Cloud Computing Accounting Start to Roll In
Image: Companies applying new guidance on accounting for cloud computing fees are finding the guidance is not so simple, and doesn’t always provide a sunny outcome on the financial statement, either. Prepare for detailed reviews of your contract, and possibly changes to key metrics and disclosures. “If someone thinks this ...
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As Compliance Risks Keep Rising, Banks Keep Rethinking
A sea change in risk is happening at big banks: Non-financial risks (read: regulatory compliance failures) are now driving the compliance conversation at large firms more than financial risks. “You can have adequate capital, adequate liquidity; but if you have the wrong kind of culture, that is where the problems ...
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When a Board Member Goes Bad
Image: Investigations into rumors of misconduct are part of a compliance officer’s job. Seldom, however, is the task as delicate as when investigating a board member. “You need to think about making decisions knowing that the facts may end up completely different, once it is all done,” Adam Frankel, general ...
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Enforcement Action May Be Omen of SEC’s Cyber-Security Plans
An investment adviser firm in St. Louis has become the (painful) test subject for the SEC’s attitude on cyber-security matters. The case, observers say, is a warning that the agency is moving away from guidance and toward enforcement. So what will the SEC consider to be “reasonable” security efforts? Will ...
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Distilling Compliance Lessons of U.S. Sanctions Laws
Crédit Agricole, fined nearly $790 million last week for violations of U.S. sanctions law, is the latest cautionary tale on this particularly nettlesome patch of corporate compliance. Penalties for sanctions lapses are surging, and the regulations themselves are growing exponentially more complicated. Sanctions compliance was a prime topic at one ...
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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 ...