All Compliance Week articles in Web Issue – Page 681
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Resource
Managing the Insider Threat with Active Directory Security
Active directory is a prime target for attackers due to its importance in authentication and authorization for all users. Unfortunately, these breaches don’t always originate from the outside. Read this white paper to explore how a typical insider threat unfolds, and how to use best security practices to defend your ...
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Blog
SEC Expects Year-End Disclosures on Revenue Rule Plans
Image: SEC Chief Accountant Jim Schnurr has advised audit committees to get involved in overseeing implementation of the new revenue standard, which takes effect in 2018. Schnurr said that should include disclosures about how the standard will affect financial statements. “We expect the level of these disclosures to increase and ...
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Blog
SEC Expects Year-End Disclosures on Revenue Rule Plans
Image: SEC Chief Accountant Jim Schnurr has advised audit committees to get involved in overseeing implementation of the new revenue standard, which takes effect in 2018. Schnurr said that should include disclosures about how the standard will affect financial statements. “We expect the level of these disclosures to increase and ...
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Blog
White: As Securities Offerings Change, SEC Adapts
Recent years have seen significant changes in terms of how securities offerings are conducted, with many of the recent regulatory reforms for public offerings the result of the JOBS ACT. At a conference in New York City on Wednesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Jo White spoke about ...
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Blog
ISS Details Proposed Policy Changes, Seeks Feedback
Institutional Shareholder Services has launched its 2016 benchmark voting policy consultation period. Policy topics for the U.S. market include unilateral amendments made by boards to company charters and bylaws without shareholder approval, director overboarding, and compensation at externally managed issuers. More inside.
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Blog
SEC’s Financial Reporting Cases, Overall Activity Surge in FY 2015
SEC Fiscal Year 2015 enforcement results revealed that for the year ended Sept. 30, 2015, the Commission filed a record-high 807 enforcement actions and obtained orders totaling approximately $4.2 billion in disgorgement and penalties. Of these 807 enforcement actions, 507 were “independent actions,” with the other 300 actions being either ...
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Blog
CW Europe: A View From the U.K. Serious Fraud Office
Image: The general counsel of Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, speaking at the Compliance Week Europe conference in Brussels this week, said the SFO hopes to have several deferred-prosecution agreements in place by the end of this year for companies the agency has been investigating for misconduct. Alun Milford provided no ...
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Blog
Companies Lag in Assessing New Revenue Rules, Survey Shows
Image: A recent survey of 335 finance executives by PwC and Financial Executives Research Foundation found that 27 percent of executives said their companies had not yet started an initial impact assessment of the new revenue standard as of summer 2015, and 48 percent had started but not completed it ...
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Blog
SEC Offers Proxy 'Unbundling' Guidance for M&A Deals
The Security and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance has released new guidance, in the form of two Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations, concerning proxy bundling in the context of mergers and acquisitions. The Exchange Act requires proxies to clearly and impartially identify each “separate matter” to be acted upon, ...
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Article
When a Board Member Goes Bad
Image: Investigations into rumors of misconduct are part of a compliance officer’s job. Seldom, however, is the task as delicate as when investigating a board member. “You need to think about making decisions knowing that the facts may end up completely different, once it is all done,” Adam Frankel, general ...
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Article
Enforcement Action May Be Omen of SEC’s Cyber-Security Plans
An investment adviser firm in St. Louis has become the (painful) test subject for the SEC’s attitude on cyber-security matters. The case, observers say, is a warning that the agency is moving away from guidance and toward enforcement. So what will the SEC consider to be “reasonable” security efforts? Will ...
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Article
Distilling Compliance Lessons of U.S. Sanctions Laws
Crédit Agricole, fined nearly $790 million last week for violations of U.S. sanctions law, is the latest cautionary tale on this particularly nettlesome patch of corporate compliance. Penalties for sanctions lapses are surging, and the regulations themselves are growing exponentially more complicated. Sanctions compliance was a prime topic at one ...
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Article
Mending the Data Privacy Gaps of the EU Safe Harbor Ruling
Image: Three weeks after Europe’s top court demolished the 15-year-old Safe Harbor Program to transfer personal data from Europe to the United States, thousands of U.S. companies that used the program are still scrambling to fill data privacy gaps. “To lean back and see how things play out is not ...
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Article
How to Worry About M&A Accounting in This Year’s Audit
Image: Merger activity is booming this year. That means plenty of scrutiny from audit firms in the coming year-end audit, since the firms themselves are under PCAOB pressure to be more skeptical of fair value, provisional figures in financial statements, and the like—all crucial to accounting for M&A deals. “Audit ...
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Blog
Compliance and the Zeitgeist in Germany
I have always been fascinated with the zeitgeist. In the world of anti-bribery and anti-corruption compliance, one rarely has the chance to observe the zeitgeist in action. However I think we are now seeing it play out in Germany in a public way. It all involves the Made in Germany ...
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Article
Let’s Change the Way We Talk About Controls
This month’s edition of the GRC Illustrated Series from Compliance Week and OCEG discusses how to address threats to the company while recognizing opportunities. Inside, learn about the integrated approach to an internal control environment that uses proactive, detective, and responsive management actions and controls to achieve principled performance.
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Blog
New Database Tracks SEC Enforcement Actions Against Public Cos.
A new, publicly-available database known as "SEED" tracks SEC enforcement actions against public companies. The database, from NYU and Cornerstone Research, will also provide the basis for ongoing academic analysis of trends in SEC enforcement.
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Blog
The U.S. Financial Reporting System, Circa 2015: Are We OK?
Not long ago a foreign student in financial reporting put a question to columnist Robert Herz: Why is the United States falling behind in financial reporting? The questioner cited three points—accounting standards, expanded audit reports, and sustainability reporting—as reason for his position. This week, Herz re-examines U.S. performance on those ...