Articles | Compliance Week – Page 290
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Running in Place or Winning the New Race?
Image: Our GRC Illustrated series returns this week, looking at how compliance programs can keep pace with new ways of communicating within business and with the new employees who use them. That will mean addressing multiple audiences through multiple channels, and it will pose new challenges for policy management, training, ...
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Audit Litigation Risk Down, but Not Out
The respite from litigation that audit firms have enjoyed the past few years may be ending. A recent study found class-action lawsuits alleging accounting improprieties rose in 2014 after two of the lightest years in the past decade. While only a tiny fraction of those class-action filings are directed at ...
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Whistleblower Laws Abroad Remain Weak and Untested
Image: What whistleblower protections exist overseas that are comparable to those under the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts? Compliance Week did a spot-check of major countries, and the results of our round-the-world tour are inside. “There’s no country in the world whose whistleblower protection laws come close to what we’ve developed ...
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Volcker Compliance Deadline Creeps Up
Image: For all the political controversy still surrounding the Volcker Rule, its biggest compliance obligation—implementing new controls and training to root out forbidden trading—has a looming deadline in July. “You’ve got to build an infrastructure,” says David Freeman of the law firm Arnold & Porter. “That’s a bigger effort than ...
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Sentencing Commission Shifts Focus on Fraud Punishments
The U.S. Sentencing Commission has adopted new sentencing guidelines for financial fraud, heaping more punishment on masterminds but reducing penalties for others who might be lower-level minions in such frauds. The change has provoked mixed emotions in the legal community. Some welcome the new flexibility extended to judges as they ...
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Conflict Minerals: From Compliance to Risk Management
Image: As a June 1 deadline nears for companies’ second year of conflict minerals compliance, some might consider life beyond the next Form SD filing to a broader risk management program for suppliers. It can be done, particularly with the OECD’s framework for conflict minerals due diligence. “The entire rule ...
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Buying Time With Revenue Standard Delay
Image: FASB might delay implementation of the new revenue recognition standard; corporate financial reporting executives should not. Despite uncertainty on fine points of the standard and business software yet to digest FASB’s seachange in reporting revenue, businesses can do plenty now. “The deferral is telling companies don’t delay in assessing ...
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Cleaning Up FCPA Cases That Spill Into Litigation
Image: Companies under investigation for possible violations of the FCPA have more than enforcement action to worry about; they must be prepared to fend off shareholder lawsuits as well. That requires some careful strategy about how to investigate FCPA allegations and document them. “I can’t tell you how often I ...
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Still Working on Culture After All These Years
Five years ago, the Dodd-Frank Act imposed new rules governing everything from derivatives trades and mortgage lending to disclosures about executive compensation and conflict mineral usage. Have all those requirements really helped companies master a stronger ethical culture? Inside, we look at what steps some companies have taken to promote ...
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Data Governance 101: Getting Started
Amassing terabytes of data is easy; for most businesses, managing those valuable—and sometimes very risky—assets is the hard part. A successful data governance initiative, experts say, isn’t a project you can hand off to the IT department or solve with a software purchase. Compliance, audit, and risk executives all need ...
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CFTC Case Against Kraft Puts Cos. on Hedge
Image: A novel interpretation of the Dodd-Frank Act is rattling buyers of raw materials. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission is moving against Kraft Foods for a big bet in the wheat market, using a section of Dodd-Frank everyone previously assumed was intended to curb high-frequency traders. “The case shows that ...
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Shop Talk: Managing Vendor Risk
Pop quiz: Try to name a recent example of corporate misconduct that did not somehow include a company’s vendors or third parties. It’s not easy, and third parties are now a huge part of the compliance officer’s responsibility. In our latest Compliance Week executive forum, we gathered a dozen CCOs ...
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A Bit More Transparency on Risks of Confidentiality Clauses
Image: The SEC is not the only government agency cracking down on “pre-taliation risk” in confidentiality agreements with employees; many others are turning their attention to the issue, too. “This is really a new focus for these agencies,” says Christopher Calsyn of the law firm Crowell Moring. Compliance officers may ...
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Roundtable Biographies - 032415
On March 24, Compliance Week and ProcessUnity presented an editorial roundtable at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. The focus of the roundtable was on systematic vendor risk management. Attendees’ full biographies are below.William BrownChief Compliance OfficerKnights of Columbus William Brown joined the Knights of Columbus as chief compliance ...
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Audit Inspections: Improvement? Maybe. Costs? Yes.
Image: Five years of increasingly rigorous PCAOB inspections have driven audit firms to improve their efforts at scrutinizing corporate financial statements and internal control. Companies receiving that pressure say the heightened scrutiny is clear; the question is whether it is making audits better, or just bigger and more expensive. “Companies ...
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Building a Compliance Ambassador Network
Sure, compliance officers do not have to fulfill their company’s ethics and compliance mission alone, but building a network of compliance ambassadors (or champions, or liaisons, or whatever you call your helpers) can be laborious. Inside, we asked compliance officers from Lockheed, GenCorp, DTE Energy, and elsewhere how they built ...
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PCAOB Inspection Data: Shifting Standards, Shifting Insights
Image: If you want to be panicky or cynical about audit firms’ performance, citing failure rates in PCAOB inspection reports is a great way to do it. The truth is more complex. In Part II of our series looking at PCAOB inspection data, we delve into how inspections have changed ...
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Smarter Approaches to Regulatory Change Management
Image: New regulations gush like a flood these days, forcing compliance officers to think of new ways to manage the current. Inside, we look at the IT strategies necessary to digest regulatory changes, plus the policy and procedure techniques to involve more parts of the enterprise. “It needs to be ...
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Q&A: Talking Insurance Industry Compliance
Image: As part of our occasional series of conversations with compliance executives, we caught up with Lee Augsburger, chief ethics and compliance officer at Prudential Financial and vice chairman of the newly established Global Insurance Chief Compliance Officers Forum. Inside, Augsburger talks about the objectives of the group and how ...
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Dodd-Frank’s Diversity Disclosures Draw Nearer
Image: While you were worrying about conflict minerals, CEO pay ratios, and the Volcker Rule, another disclosure requirement from the Dodd-Frank Act has been quietly approaching. Any day now, regulators hint, final rules will emerge for how companies assess and report workforce diversity. “A lot of people just weren’t paying ...