All SEC articles – Page 80
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Blog
SEC Charges CCO of SFX With Compliance Failures
The Securities and Exchange Commission last week brought fraud charges against the former president of SFX Financial Advisory Management Enterprises for stealing client funds. The firm and its chief compliance officer separately agreed to settle charges that they were responsible for related compliance failures and other violations. Details inside.
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Big 4 Make Big Gains in Consulting Services, Report Says
Image: According to a new report from Source Information Services, Big 4 accounting firms outperformed the U.S. market in 2014, growing 12.8 percent to $17.5 billion in revenue compared with 2.4 percent growth for the economy overall. The U.S. market for consulting grew 9 percent in 2014 to more than ...
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Poll Portends Big Changes in Executive Pay Disclosure
A recent poll by Towers Watson hints at big changes to come in disclosure of executive compensation, in the wake of the SEC’s proposed pay-for-performance rules. One-third of poll respondents said they expect to change their compensation disclosure significantly; 55 percent said they expect to provide additional information and analysis ...
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Gallagher Uncorks on SEC Action Against CCOs
Image: SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher, often a contrarian voice at the agency, spoke up again last week to denounce recent enforcement actions against compliance officers at investment advisory firms. Gallagher panned the SEC rule that dictates how investment advisers establish compliance procedures, and he railed that “the Commission seems to ...
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SEC Might Explore Auditor Tenure for Audit Committee Disclosure
Image: When the SEC issues its audit committee discussion paper, it likely will explore more on the audit firm’s tenure and naming engagement partners. As the PCAOB has tried to get consensus on these themes, the board has heard pushback that the disclosure is better placed in audit committee reports, ...
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Article
SEC Rule on Pay-for-Performance Triggers Criticism on TSR Metric
Image: The SEC’s proposed pay-for-performance rule would require companies to disclose the relationship between executive compensation and Total Shareholder Return. A simple and effective metric? Not everyone thinks so. “At first blush it’s intuitive: executives should win as shareholders win,” says Barry Sullivan of compensation consulting firm Semler Brossy. The ...
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SEC Commissioners Want New Rules for Transfer Agents
In an increasingly rare display of unity among members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, they say that the Commission needs to dust off decades-old rules for transfer agents. New requirements could include requiring agents to be appropriately insured, properly disclosing conflicts of interest; and being subjected to more robust ...
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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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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
SEC Settles Fraud Charges at Tech Firm
Computer Science Corp. has agreed to pay $190 million to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company and former executives concealed from investors problems with a high-profile client and manipulated financial results, in addition to fudging with accounting at overseas units.
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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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SEC Sues Bulgarian Trader for EDGAR-Assisted Avon Stock Scheme
The SEC says it knows who was behind fake tender offers posted to its EDGAR database and is suing the Bulgarian man it claims is responsible. On June 4, the Commission filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Nedko Nedev and firms he was associated with. He allegedly masterminded ...
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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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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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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
Errors Persist Into 2014 Year-End XBRL Filings
Image: With another round of annual reports mostly filed through the early part of 2015, experts are assessing the quality of XBRL filings—and seeing not much improvement. Scale errors continue to be the most common problem, says Alex Rapp, co-founder of Calcbench. “Unfortunately, many filers don’t appear to realize this ...
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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
Deutsche Bank to Pay $55 Million for Misstating Financial Reports
Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay a $55 million penalty to the SEC to resolve charges that it filed misstated financial reports, which failed to take into account a material risk for potential losses estimated to be in the billions of dollars, during the height of the financial crisis. Details ...