News of poor internal controls at the Securities and Exchange Commission always gets a rueful chuckle from compliance and financial reporting executives everywhere. Thus Compliance Week is happy to deliver yet another dose of SEC schadenfreude.
The agency’s inspector general just published a report on SEC pay practices, uncovering numerous lapses in judgment in the waning days of former chairman Christopher Cox. Most notably, the agency doled out pay raises and bonuses for seven senior employees—one receiving as much as $85,000—without any documentation, simply because those employees answered directly to Cox.
