Articles | Compliance Week – Page 287
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Hertz Restatement Drives Home Top-Level Control Issues
Image: Car rental kingpin Hertz Corp. is nearly finished with its sweeping restatement of several years’ worth of financial statements, and it’s giving compliance and audit executives plenty of cautionary tales to read. Its latest annual report outlines—in frank detail—more than a dozen failures, most of them in senior leadership. ...
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Four Years On, Firms Still Struggle With CFPB Compliance
What have we learned in the four years the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been on the beat? For starters, it’s aggressive, returning $10 billion so far to consumers through enforcement actions. A solid understanding of the CFPB’s compliance program expectations remains elusive, and the mood among firms in the ...
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How Comment Letters Could Shape the Pay Ratio Rule
When the SEC proposed its pay ratio disclosure rule in 2013, it included a list of nearly 60 questions for public comment. The response: 287,547 letters and counting, with plenty of ideas about dealing with foreign workforces, seasonal workers, employee exclusions, and Sarbanes-Oxley certification risks. As the final rule slouches ...
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University Compliance Programs Taking Shape
Image: Big compliance changes are afoot in higher education, as more universities hire their first enterprise-wide compliance officer—a trend that took flight in 2013 and keeps on going. “[A]cademic medical centers aside, a central compliance function is a newer concept than in the corporate world,” says Robert Roach, CCO of ...
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Q&A: How PetroTiger Avoided FCPA Prosecution
Image: As part of our occasional series of conversations with voices in the compliance world, we caught up with Timothy Treanor, a partner with law firm Sidley Austin who represented oil and gas company PetroTiger. In June, PetroTiger became just the second company in recent history of the Foreign Corrupt ...
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Firms Prepare for Heightened AML, Due Diligence Expectations
Expect an even greater focus on anti-money laundering efforts in upcoming examinations by the SEC and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That was the message from speakers at a “Compliance Outreach Program” the Securities and Exchange Commission hosted for financial firms last week. What’s more: New Treasury Department rules that could ...
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Extra Year on Revenue Standard Means More Time to Sweat
Image: Don’t let your accounting department get too excited with that additional year FASB has granted to adopt the new standard for revenue recognition. Experts helping companies’ implementation efforts say that extra time is much needed, with plenty of questions about the standard remaining unanswered. And don’t forget, “half of ...
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Taming Vendor Risks Continues to Flummox Compliance Programs
Image: Vendor risks driving you crazy? Well, you are not alone. In a recent survey compliance and audit professionals gave their vendor risk management programs an overall score of only 2.8 on a 1 to 5 scale. Thankfully, corporate boardrooms are paying more attention now. “It’s risen to a level ...
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Distilling Lessons From Recent Sanctions Cases
The Justice Department clearly is prosecuting more companies for sanctions or export control violations: 15 enforcement actions since 2010, compared to only three in the prior three years. Inside, we’ve sifted out themes arising from those settlements to understand more about what factors regulators weigh when resolving charges and how ...
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Product Safety Recalls Create New Breed of Compliance Concerns
Image: Automakers, airbag manufacturers, and even ice cream companies have suffered regulatory wrath over product safety concerns and inadequate recall procedures. Those in the crosshairs, especially if the Consumer Product Safety Commission is involved, are finding that their missteps can come with hefty fines and rigid compliance demands. “Companies that ...
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Mending Social Media Compliance Gaps
Two recent studies hold both good and bad news on the state of social media compliance today: Compliance officers no longer approach corporate use of social media with the trepidation they once did, but those channels leave companies increasingly vulnerable to regulatory violations. According to these studies, the financial services ...
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CFPB’s ‘UDAAP’ Approach Is an Ambiguous Compliance Concern
Image: “Unfair and deceptive practices” have long been an enforcement area for consumer protection. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is adding an A for “abusive”—and taking away clarity for financial firms about what its UDAAP standard exactly means. “There is no list of clear black-and-white rules, and that’s what ...
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New IIA Framework Pushes Audit Executives to Think Forward
Image: The Institute of Internal Auditors has unveiled its new professional practices framework, guidance intended to drive auditors to think more critically about risk management and organizational improvement. “It’s about making sure we understand the changes taking place in business and learning to use those to our advantage,” says Larry ...
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How to Simplify Cyber-Security Controls Amid Abundant Laws
By now every compliance officer has already heard the warning that it’s a matter of when you suffer a cyber-security breach, not if. Then comes compliance with breach disclosure rules—and those demands are becoming as perplexing as the cyber-threat itself. Overwhelmed, compliance officers are seeking ways to navigate these demands ...
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Avoiding the Pitfalls of Data Mining
In recent months, numerous companies have found themselves the target of legal and enforcement actions for obtaining or using personal data without consent. The kicker: Most of these actions could have been easily avoided, since most of the infractions were clear violations of contract law. “If companies simply complied with ...
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U.S. Failures to Track Beneficial Owners Create AML Headaches Internationally
Image: Despite the forward march in Europe and elsewhere to fight money laundering, a problem remains: Here at the largest economy in the world, state incorporation laws in the United States create a massive loophole that bad actors can exploit. “It’s a huge problem not just for the United States ...
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Rule Change to Ease Export Controls in the Cloud
Image: Good news: U.S. export control regulations may finally be catching up to modern cloud computing technology, with new rules to focus on keeping sensitive data secure rather than on where the data is stored. Defense and tech companies are likely to be beneficiaries, as they could now use cloud ...
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EU AML Directive Fires Starting Pistol on Beneficial Owners Reform
European financial firms are preparing to implement new anti-money laundering rules that will require reporting about the real owners of the businesses they work with. The rules, intended to help EU governments pursue tax crimes and terrorist financing, “will increase the level of transparency across all transactions,” says Ambrose Loughlin ...
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PCAOB, SEC Redouble Efforts on Audit Quality
Image: The SEC and PCAOB are pushing this summer to clarify and improve “audit quality.” That might be a proposal to name the engagement partner working on corporate audits (PCAOB idea), or an exploration of new disclosure requirements for audit committees (SEC idea), or both. “I would urge commenters to ...
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All the Questions Confronting Clawback Policy
The SEC has proposed a new rule that publicly traded companies adopt a clawback policy to recoup incentive-based compensation from executives that later turns out to be based on faulty financial statements. How hard can that be? Well, pretty hard, many compensation experts say. Inside, we have the run-down on ...