Articles | Compliance Week – Page 287
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Little to Fear in New World of Lease Accounting
Accounting for leases is about to undergo a profound change, thanks to a new standard adopted by accounting rulemakers in the United States and overseas. The new standard has its critics; in a special guest column this week, Gary Kabureck—former chief accounting officer of Xerox, now a member of the ...
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The Technology Transforming Your Annual Audit
Image: The audit profession is slowly retooling itself for the modern IT age, after decades of reliance on random sampling and manual methods that now fail to meet today’s expectations for precision. “Ultimately, this is how the industry will finally achieve its long-term goal of continuous auditing,” says Joanna Schultz ...
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Working With External Compliance Monitors
Image: So your company has just entered into a settlement with a U.S. government agency and must now install a compliance monitor. How do you respond? For many companies, working with an external compliance monitor is still an intimidating process tainted by misconceptions. “A monitorship was never designed to ...
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SEC Girds for Next Wave of Political Battles
On paper, the next several months mark the final stretch for the SEC’s implementation of Dodd-Frank Act rulemaking. In reality expect continued battles over the law, waged by both Republicans and Democrats. Recent congressional hearings gave a sense of what’s to come: stress tests for asset management funds, fights over ...
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Employee Investigations Post-Yates Memo
Image: Any company that has faced allegations of corporate misconduct knows how quickly the scope and cost of an internal investigation can grow—a concern that has only amplified following the Justice Department’s Yates Memo. “Corporate compliance professionals have expressed concern that this policy will result in companies undertaking unnecessarily broad, ...
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Companies Aren’t Waiting for SEC to Revamp Financial Disclosures
A new survey that many companies are not waiting for the SEC to complete its anticipated review of disclosure requirements; some are already taking matters into their own hands, and they have advice for others who want to get ahead of the process. “Be aggressive,” says David Cornish, deputy comptroller ...
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Cloud Security Is a Challenge for Users and Providers
As more cloud storage providers evolve from consumer-based products to enterprise-grade services, compliance challenges are evolving along with them. Before entering into a service contract, companies must determine whether their data will be safe and all is in compliance with a growing list of regulations and security frameworks. The added ...
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How to Panic Effectively With So Many Effective Dates Coming
Image: Revenue recognition, leasing, financial instruments—the accounting standards for all three have major changes looming, and that means financial reporting executives have lots of implementation to juggle in a short period. This week we look at how to manage so much change well and which companies face the most work. ...
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Parsing the Role of the New Compliance Counsel
Image: Now that the Justice Department has named Hui Chen, former global head of anti-bribery and corruption at Standard Chartered Bank, as its first-ever compliance counsel, corporations under investigation by the department can expect a more nuanced analysis of their compliance programs. Inside, we review what Chen has disclosed so ...
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Achieving a Unified View of Financial Crime Risk
Increased regulatory scrutiny and the sting of billions in fines and penalties resulting from misconduct have prompted many financial firms to pour money into their compliance programs—investments that may be in vain without a unified view of risk. The tech challenges to build that view are considerable, but not impossible ...
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Disclosure Update: How Companies Are Tackling Comp Rules
The Dodd-Frank Act brims with new disclosure demands regarding executive compensation. Slowly but surely—emphasis on slowly—the SEC has been issuing rules on clawbacks, pay for performance, and the dreaded pay ratio rule. This week, we look at those three measures and what companies have done so far to comply with ...
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Defense Dept. Steps Up Standards on IT Supply Chain Risk
Image: The Defense Department is taking a harder look at supply chain risks posed by government contractors who provide IT products and services, so compliance officers at those businesses should prepare to review how supply chain risks might affect eligibility to bid on future contracts. “This fits into the government’s ...
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FASB Ideas on Materiality Reform Draw Heat, Questions
Image: An effort to align the accounting world’s definition of materiality with how the idea is widely understood in legal circles is sparking a fierce debate in corporate accounting circles, with potentially big consequences for financial reporting. “More information or more disclosure is better than less, in general,” said Damon ...
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Connected Medical Systems, HIPAA Audits Coming in 2016
Image: Inspectors at the Department of Health & Human Services are going to spend 2016 studying the security protocols for medical devices and electronic health records, which means compliance officers in the healthcare field should make sure your policies and controls can pass muster. Also on deck are more HIPAA ...
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SEC’s Next Move on Conflict Minerals Rule Could Open a Pandora’s Box
The SEC finds itself yet again at a legal crossroads concerning its embattled Conflict Minerals Rule. One path leads to the Supreme Court; the other, a retreat from a cornerstone of the rule’s disclosure requirements. At stake is not just the Conflict Minerals Rule alone, but potentially a wide range ...
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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 ...