Articles | Compliance Week – Page 291
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
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 ...
-
Article
Monitoring Your Anti-Retaliation Program
Complaints of whistleblower retaliation are a persistent problem in Corporate America, and all the more irritating for companies that may believe they have solid anti-retaliation programs in place. Inside, we walk through the harder part of anti-retaliation efforts: not just creating the policy, but working with HR and line managers ...
-
Article
Managing the Risky Business of Loyalty Programs
As the regulatory focus on data security expands, companies that offer customer loyalty programs should review them for red flags. How the data is stored, protected, and segmented is ripe for scrutiny, experts warn. Poorly designed loyalty programs could run afoul of antitrust laws, torpedo a merger, violate HIPAA, or ...
-
Article
Conflict Minerals, Year 2: The Auditing Challenge
Few companies so far have addressed the audit requirement in the SEC’s Conflict Minerals Rule, although that will likely change as the June deadline for your second year’s filings approaches.
-
Article
NLRB’s Brain-Dump on Lawful Company Policies
Image: The National Labor Relations Board has churned out an extensive piece of guidance on what makes a company policy lawful or not, on everything from making disparaging comments (often can’t be forbidden) to talking with the media or regulators (forget about forbidding it) and many more. “The memo is ...
-
Article
The Latest State of Affairs on Whistleblower Claims
Image: A final rule from OSHA has smoothed the path for employees to file whistleblower retaliation claims under the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts and put companies in a more difficult spot to defend themselves. “The final rule reinforces that these types of anti-retaliation provisions are here to stay,” says Daniel ...
-
Article
PCAOB Inspection Reports at 5: What Can We Learn
The compliance and audit community have pored over PCAOB inspection data on audit firms for five years now. What does the data tell us, really? This week Compliance Week begins a special series looking at the insights that the inspection process can give—starting with how much value the disclosure of ...
-
Article
Managing Data Security and Privacy Risks 2.0
Image: Modern technology allows powerful employee monitoring ability to sharpen business performance and even support compliance efforts. The bad news: Those technologies also spawn a new set of data security risks to keep compliance officers busy. “The key is trying to strike a balance between the employee’s personal privacy interests ...
-
Article
High Court Ruling Is Boon for Regulators, Snare for Business
Image: Compliance officers worried about regulatory change, prepare yourself: The Supreme Court’s ruling to give agencies more leeway in re-interpreting rules does you no favors. Today’s estranged Washington politics means regulators are bound to try re-interpretation for the sake of expedient rulemaking, and CCOs will need to be vigilant. “This ...
-
Article
Human Trafficking Compliance Arrives for Federal Contractors
Image: Starting this month, government contractors must ensure that their supply chain is free of human-trafficking activities. The thicket of new requirements isn’t too different conceptually from other compliance obligations, but the nuances of human-trafficking risk will pose some tricky policy challenges. Companies previously might not have thought much about ...
-
Article
Report Spotlights the Underbelly of ‘Audit Politics’
Image: A new report finds corporate political pressure on chief audit executives to alter audit plans or results is “extensive and pervasive,” and it underlines the need for audit professionals to master the art of office politics. “We were really surprised by the extent of pressure,” says Larry Rittenberg, co-author ...