All Rules & Proposals articles – Page 55
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Article
New ‘Blacklisting’ Rules Have Contractors in Uproar
Image: Uncle Sam is poised to impose sweeping new reporting obligations on government contractors to disclose labor law violations for the prior three years. Trade associations are spitting nails over the rules, but meanwhile, compliance officers have yet another reporting risk that needs process and attention. “You don’t want a ...
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Blog
Regulators Finalize Dodd-Frank Diversity Policies
Under a Dodd-Frank Act requirement, federal banking regulators, the SEC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have issued a formal policy for assessing the diversity policies and practices of the entities they regulate. The regulators call for a “model assessment” that would include a self-assessment by each covered entity of ...
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Article
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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Blog
Basel Pitches Bank Rules to Remedy Interest Rate Shocks
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, with a consultative document released on Monday, is seeking public comment on proposals regarding what measures large banks should take, and how much reserve capital they should hold, to weather interest rate risks. More inside.
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Blog
SEC Offers Pay Ratio Rule Analysis for Public Comment
The SEC still has given no sign of a final pay ratio disclosure rule, but there is a new analysis from its Division of Economic and Risk Analysis that the Commission has made available for public comment. The analysis considers the potential effects of excluding different percentages of employees from ...
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Blog
Survey: Shareholder Pressure Prompts Boards to Rethink Compensation
Nearly 60 percent of companies say their boards expanded compensation explanations in proxy statements as a result of shareholder feedback, and almost one-third of those boards changed executive compensation plans outright in response to pressure from investors. Those findings come from the National Association of Corporate Directors and respondents to ...
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Blog
Warren: SEC Chair’s Tenure ‘Extremely Dissapointing’
Image: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.), at left, fired with both barrels at SEC Chairman Mary Jo White this week, in a blistering 13-page letter describing White’s tenure as “extremely disappointing” and full of “broken promises.” Among Warren’s concerns: the lack of a final pay-ratio rule and the dearth of guilt ...
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Blog
How Dodd-Frank Is Working—and How It Isn’t
Image: Congress is back in session, which means another round of political bickering over reform of the Dodd-Frank Act. Alas, Compliance Week Editor Matt Kelly says, the law is already working as one would expect—that is, a little bit effectively, and a little bit stupidly. Compliance officers should not hold ...
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Blog
Tips on Building a Better, User-Friendly EDGAR
A slew of business groups, from the Center for Audit Quality to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others, have voiced their collective opinion on how the SEC can improve the EDGAR filing process. Their top recommendations were search improvements and the ability to download data in multiple formats. See ...
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Blog
Senator Presses SEC on Fake EDGAR Filings
Image: In a letter to SEC Chair Mary Jo White, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded more information about fake filings, including a fictitious Avon takeover bid, that somehow make their way onto the agency’s EDGAR system. “This pattern of fraudulent conduct is troubling, especially in light of the relative ease ...
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Blog
Former Commissioners Slam SEC for Inaction on Political Spending Rule
The latest push to get the SEC to act on a rulemaking petition that companies disclose political contributions and spending on lobbyists: pressure from former commissioners. “The Commission’s inaction is inexplicable,” William Henry Donaldson, Arthur Levitt, and Bevis Longstreth wrote in a letter to current SEC Chair Mary Jo White. ...
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Blog
States Sue to Stop SEC’s Regulation A+
In petitions filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, officials in Massachusetts and Montana, concerned by the diminished role of state securities regulators, are asking the court to vacate the Securities and Exchange Commission’s expansion of the Regulation A exemption ahead of its June 9 ...
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Blog
SEC Proposes New Disclosures for Investment Companies
The SEC has proposed new rules and forms to modernize reporting for mutual funds, ETFs, and other registered investment companies. A new monthly portfolio reporting requirement, Form N-PORT, would require registered funds, other than money market funds, to provide portfolio-wide and position-level holdings data to the SEC. Details inside.
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Article
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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Blog
CW2015: Cutting Through Compliance Complexity
Kicking off Compliance Week 2015 in Washington D.C. on Monday, compliance experts from Boeing, Walmart, and General Electric stressed the importance of having employees take part in culture-building and breaking training into simple, direct objectives. See more from their discussion inside.
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Blog
Ding, Dong: EDGAR Fraud Calling
On May 14, PTG Capital Partners, a London-based investment firm, disclosed in a regulatory filing on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system that it offered to buy Avon for $18.75 a share. The firm, however is fictitious, raising questions of how EDGAR was gamed and why the filing was ...
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Blog
Survey: Overloaded CCOs Expect Increased Personal Liability
Compliance officers have two fears on their minds these days: increased regulatory fatigue and overload; and the threat of increasing personal liability for corporate misconduct. More than one-third of all firms already spend at least one day every week simply tracking and analyzing regulatory developments, according to Thomson Reuters’ annual ...
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Article
As SEC Delays on Extractive Payments, World Moves Ahead
The SEC has fought all sides on its proposed rule to disclose payments to governments for mining rights: oil and gas companies on one hand saying the rule is flawed; activists on the other saying the rule is overdue. The trouble, however, is that while the SEC tussles in court, ...
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Blog
Study: Social Media Befuddles Compliance
The average Fortune 100 firm has approximately 320 social media accounts and engages with more than 210,000 “followers” annually. The problem, according to a new study, is that the pace, scale, and informal culture of corporate social media creates regulatory risks that go beyond the traditional skill set of compliance ...
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Blog
SEC Approves Tick-Size Pilot Program
The SEC has approved a proposal by the national securities exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for a two-year pilot program that will widen the minimum quoting and trading increments, known as tick sizes, for stocks of some smaller companies. The program—to begin May 6, 2016—will include stocks of ...