Articles | Compliance Week – Page 294
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Assessing Your Digital Marketing Risk
Internal auditors with not enough to do, cheer up: Digital marketing risk is emerging as a new headache to keep you busy. Data theft and fraud are rampant, and ways to find and seal up those weaknesses aren’t entirely clear. “It’s a newer area,” says Bill Michalisin of the Institute ...
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NLRB Push Forces Rethinking of Social Media Policies
Through numerous rulings last year, the National Labor Relations Board reshaped the boundaries of acceptable social media policies companies can impose on employees. The result: an unsettling world where, yes, employees might be allowed to curse a manager or to use corporate e-mail to raise pro-union sentiments. Compliance officers might ...
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Latest PCI Standard Pushes Toward Risk Management
Image: Version 3.0 of the PCI Data Security Standard goes into effect this month—and maybe, just possibly, it will strengthen companies’ discipline against credit card data theft. The new standard prods companies to approach security as a continuous risk monitoring duty. “You can’t have smooth implementation until you start to ...
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Lessons to Learn From the Alstom Fiasco
The record $772 million criminal penalty reached between the Justice Department and French power and transportation giant Alstom is yet another real-life example of corporate governance gone haywire. Abounding with cover-ups and an overall lack of due diligence, “The Alstom case is the antithesis of the hallmarks of an effective ...
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XBRL Filing Frustrations Tilting Toward Resolution
Image: Good news for companies weary of the unfulfilled promises around publishing financial data using XBRL: Events are looming that promise either to halt the march toward XBRL compliance or finally shove its usage forward. “XBRL is not working,” says Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition. “Instead of getting ...
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Preparing for Pay Rules, Privacy, and a New Congress
The SEC is likely to spend 2015 churning through as much rulemaking for the Dodd-Frank Act as it can, never mind being years behind schedule on that front. To complicate matters for the agency, Congress is also likely to try repealing some parts of the law even before the SEC ...
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T&E Controls That Won’t Get You Busted
Image: Title: TillenThe SEC set the compliance community buzzing in December with two FCPA enforcement actions that hinge on improper travel and entertainment spending—an offense historically seldom seen in FCPA enforcement. Usually, “T&E abuses are add-on charges to an enforcement action involving a larger pool of improper activity,” says James ...
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Better Ways to Test Banks’ Stress
Image: Title: KraynThe banking world will start 2015 with another bout of hand-wringing over stress tests. Critics question whether the tests probe what truly makes large banks a threat to the financial system, and banks know they must somehow use technology to streamline the annual exercise. “Throwing people at the ...
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More Cooperation, More Whistleblowing, More Prosecution
Image: Title: Berland2015 may be the year when overseas regulators hit their stride in prosecuting companies for misconduct, as tactics get more sophisticated and investigations come to fruition. In the United States, enforcement stemming from whistleblowers will be at full speed and pressure to cooperate with prosecutors will be high. ...
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Recognize the Big Standards’ Changes
The auditing and financial reporting world will spend lots of 2015 preparing for the new revenue recognition standard going into effect by 2017—but from leasing to going concern warnings to IFRS adoption in the United States, plenty of other major changes may arrive as well. “Folks have come to see ...
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Britain Braces for New Supervisory Regime
Image: British Banks are bracing for “incredible pressure” in 2015 as they implement new rules to make senior executives personally accountable to regulators. Compliance functions will help lead the creation of the new Senior Managers Regime, complete with certification overload. “Regulators will expect compliance in the spirit of the regulations, ...
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Maturing Conflict Minerals Programs in Year 2
Image: Now that everyone has closed their Excel files on the first year of conflict minerals compliance, companies are pushing toward greater automation in Year 2. Reducing lines of data about smelters in your supply chain is one step, improving data integrity another. “Technology can help you understand the supply ...
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Companies Face New Twists in Shareholder Proposals
What the SEC giveth, the courts may taketh away—a point made clear lately by two conflicting messages for companies seeking to keep shareholder proposals off the proxy statement. At the SEC, a victory for Whole Foods suggests the agency might be more business-friendly in granting no-action letters this coming proxy ...
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SEC Nudges Companies on Cash Flows
The SEC is urging companies to tighten accounting procedures around the statement of cash flows, amid a steady rise in restatements associated with it. Speaking at the national AICPA conference earlier this month, SEC staffer Kirk Crews said the majority of errors were “due to relatively less complex applications” of ...
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Insider-Trading Risks Get More Complicated
Image: The appellate court decision to overturn insider-trading convictions of two Wall Streeters brings clarity to some aspects of the crime. It does not, however, reduce insider-trading risks. Yes, the ruling narrows the scope of such offenses, but “a compliance officer would have to be out of his mind to ...
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Shop Talk: Useful Metrics, Effective Training
Effective compliance programs hinge on good training and proper metrics to see how your training influences employee behavior. That was the subject of Compliance Week’s latest executive roundtable, held in Washington and sponsored by LRN. Complete coverage is inside, from what effective metrics look like to how effective training works.
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Roundtable Biographies - 120314
On Dec. 3, Compliance Week and LRN presented an editorial roundtable at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. The focus of the roundtable was on measuring program effectiveness. Attendees’ full biographies are below.Karen BerthaChief Ethics & Compliance OfficerMCR Karen Bertha serves as the chief ethics and compliance officer of ...
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Regulators Publish Latest Thinking on AML Compliance
Image: Financial regulators have just updated their examination manual for anti-money laundering compliance, giving financial firms plenty of holiday reading on how they should structure their AML programs. “The big changes are in areas where things have moved forward: virtual currency, prepaid cards, changes in the SAR rules, aggregation for ...
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More Hints on Putting New COSO to Work
It’s official: The SEC will not roast companies over an open flame if they continue to use the old COSO framework for internal controls into 2015. That said, SEC staffers also warned at the annual AICPA conference last week that their largesse will not last long, and a bevy of ...
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SEC Gives More Ideas on Less Disclosure
Image: A small army of SEC officials attended the annual AICPA conference last week, offering all manner of advice to financial reporting executives struggling to comply with external reporting rules. One subject: how to achieve better disclosure with fewer words. “We are aware there are some registrants that seem to ...