Articles | Compliance Week – Page 291
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ITT Complaint Shows Off-Balance-Sheet Woes Aren’t Off-Stage Yet
An SEC lawsuit against ITT Educational Services could shape up to be another textbook case of what goes wrong when companies try to deal with problematic accounting away from the eye of investors. The problem this time: off-balance sheet vehicles that masked ITT’s defaulting student loans. Where were the auditors? ...
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The Workflows You Need to Use After a Data Breach
Compliance officers have enough scrambling to do after a data breach. Not understanding the steps to take, or not being in proper position to take them, only makes matters worse. Inside, guest columnist John Reed Stark walks through all the steps your company needs to take—including those to take before ...
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How Do You Solve a Problem Like EDGAR?
Image: In a way, the person who submitted false filings to the SEC last month proposing a fictional takeover of Avon Products did the corporate filing community a favor: He reminded everyone how bad the SEC’s EDGAR filing database can be. Ideas to modernize EDGAR are many; ability to achieve ...
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Demystifying the Risks of Board-Level Risk Committees
Image: In the wake of the financial crisis, many large financial institutions created new, board-level risk committees to oversee their most critical risk issues. For other industries, the decision to create a risk committee isn’t so simple—and isn’t without some risk-taking itself. “You have to guard against the risk that ...
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Export Control Reform Still Lags, Leaving Compliance Programs in Lurch
Image: Anyone involved in international trade might hope that one day, in the long run, export control reform will alleviate the compliance burden companies face now. In the short run, however, expect even more pain as reform ideas inch along. “This is one of the most complex and changing environments ...
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CCOs Need to Be Schooled on Effective Training
Compliance and ethics training needs to move beyond the standard training video and PC-based testing. While online tests are an adequate exercise in rote memorization, experts say the future of effective training means understanding the unique psychologies of the workforce and managers, customizing your messages, and shaping training objectives around ...
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FSOC Report Offers Tea Leaves for Future Regulatory Focus
What are the top threats to the U.S. financial system? In a new report, the Financial Stability Oversight Council cites cyber-security, financial innovations, and high-frequency trading among the problems regulators must address. Critics fret, however, that the agency wants “to get rid of the capital markets and replace everything with ...
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Lessons From the BHP Billiton Case
Image: If compliance officers needed another reminder that the FCPA’s books-and-records provisions are still a dangerous trap for global businesses, look no further than the SEC’s recent $25 million fine against BHP Billiton. Observers say it offers valuable lessons in the SEC’s expansive interpretation of the law. “A check-the-box compliance ...
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Fighting Complexity With Integrated Compliance Efforts
More than ever before, managing compliance risk now requires a framework that unifies decentralized compliance activities. The goal: to streamline monitoring, testing, and reporting. That may sound difficult in theory—and, well, it’s difficult in practice too. Inside we have tales from Coca-Cola and Kimberly-Clark on how they try to integrate ...
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More Hints at More Audit Committee Disclosure
Image: The SEC plans a concept release “soon” that could modernize audit committee disclosures for the first time in years, including touchy subjects like naming the audit engagement partner. Expect awkward questions to follow about how audit firms are hired and perform the work they do. “This foreshadows what I ...
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Resolving Compliance and HR Turf Wars
Image: Compliance and HR have been tussling for years over which function owns company culture, when the truth is both have a crucial role to play. “If HR and compliance could come together and realize and accept that they’re on the same team … it could be a really powerful ...
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The Next Plateau for CCOs: Becoming Leaders
Image: More and more evidence suggests compliance officers are now sitting alongside other senior corporate leaders at their organizations—so now they need to exercise that leadership role properly. That was the discussion at Compliance Week 2015, and we have all the insights inside. “More compliance officers are being asked for ...
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The Real State of CCO Legal Liability
A compliance mishap in a company can feel like a professional failure to chief compliance officers; a more urgent question is whether it might also bring professional liability. At Compliance Week 2015, enforcement officials with the SEC and Justice Department, as well as compliance professionals themselves, explored how CCOs can ...
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Audit Relations Continue to Be Strained
Image: Tensions over the audit of internal controls over financial reporting were in focus at the Compliance Week 2015 conference last week, with many saying corporate audit committees will ultimately need to resolve the problem. “We hear the concerns, even frustrations, from company officials over the level of audit work ...
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Survey: CCOs Lack Confidence in FCPA Financial Controls
Compliance officers do not have much confidence in their companies’ financial controls to catch books-and-records violations of the FCPA, according to a new report published by Compliance Week and Kroll. The finding was one of many included in the 2015 Anti-Bribery & Corruption Report, looking at all manner of anti-corruption ...
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COSO Implementation Gets Gritty
Whether you adopted the new COSO framework for internal control last year or stalled into 2015, a chorus of voices say now is the time for implementation (or even polishing last year’s implementation) once and for all. “This year is the time to adopt,” says KPMG partner David Middendorf. Inside, ...
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Is CSR Part of the Compliance Operation?
Corporate social responsibility is now big business in Europe. How the compliance function intersects with CSR, however—and what role the compliance officer should play in CSR oversight—is still unclear. In the final part of our series on CSR, we look at how several European companies are trying to embed CSR ...
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Dodd-Frank Reform: The Beat Goes On
The Dodd-Frank Act may be turning five years old this summer. Fights about Dodd-Frank, on the other hand, feel like they’ve been going on forever. Washington was back at it again last week, proposing various fixes, reforms, and exemptions to all manner of Dodd-Frank, much of it to help large-ish ...
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Hurry-Up Offense on Employee Surveillance
Image: Surveillance of employee activity is nothing new in the financial services sector, but the financial crisis, the LIBOR scandal, and other misconduct are driving new demands for smarter, better surveillance. Inside, we look at some of the IT challenges to extracting better intelligence from your data. The goal is ...
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Compliance Trends in 2015: More Authority, More IT Uncertainty
Good news for compliance officers in existential crisis: A majority of CCOs are now part of the senior management teams at their businesses, and they have more authority than ever before. Those are two among many findings of the 2015 Compliance Trends Report, the annual survey of compliance leaders conducted ...