Articles | Compliance Week – Page 278
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Pax World’s Joe Keefe on how ESG continues to go mainstream
Image: The 2016 proxy season, building upon trends that emerged from last year’s annual meetings, may prove to be pivotal for investors focused on sustainability, diversity, and environmental issues. “I’ve seen more uptake in the last 18 months than I’ve seen in the previous 17 years,” says Joe Keefe, president ...
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Q&A with Randy Stephens of NAVEX Global: Why third-party due diligence still flummoxes so many companies
Image: Third-party risk continues to be a major concern for executives, and there is no shortage of high-profile compliance failures in recent years. And yet, a recent survey by NAVEX Global of more than 300 ethics and compliance professionals found that 32 percent of their companies don’t evaluate third parties ...
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Proxy season debates may include board scrutiny and short-termism
With proxy season just around the corner, the annual tradition of assessing the mood of investors has begun. On tap, experts say, are demands for improved transparency and communication, better disclosures, and a continuing scrutiny of directors, including how (and how much) they and their C-suite cohorts are compensated. “We ...
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Footnotes of the future: reflections from the Disclosure Initiative
The IASB hears from investors all the time: Financial statement disclosures are too complicated, with too much insignificant detail; unorganized footnotes; and language that reads like a checklist. Seems the board has been listening. Inside, IASB member Gary Kabureck discusses some of the actions the board is taking to improve ...
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Women on U.K. boards: A (partial) success story
Corporate boards across the United Kingdom continue to have low numbers of women on them, suggesting that the struggle to increase board diversity is going slower than planned. But progress is indeed being made, all while raising the difficult questions as to why it is not so easy to build ...
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Putting FINRA’s priorities into practice
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s full court press on addressing emerging and existing risks in the securities industry will continue to intensify in 2016, reinforced by a steady surge in restitution, disciplinary actions, and bars and suspensions over the last five years. What are FINRA’s top regulatory and examination priorities, ...
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ArticleSpain bolsters anti-competition enforcement
Spanish regulators are paying closer attention to anti-competitive behavior across several industries, demonstrated by record fines and enforcement actions reached in 2015. Multinationals with operations in Spain should heed the warning. “We are now seeing that the amount of total fines [is] getting higher and higher,” says Crisanto Perez-Abad of ...
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Accounting standards update brings lease contracts under the spotlight
Image: After years of reports that entities would one day be required to reflect all of their lease obligations on the balance sheet, companies finally have a major new accounting standard to adopt that will bring all but the tiniest assets and liabilities arising from lease contracts onto corporate balance ...
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Gender pay gap reporting in the United Kingdom
The draft regulations on reporting statistics outlining the potential gender pay gap at U.K. companies were published in early February this year, and reactions to the regulations have on the whole been positive, says Jillian Naylor, employment partner at U.K. law firm Linklaters. Inside, CW’s Paul Hodgson provides an in-depth ...
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ArticleIs blockchain technology FinTech’s magic bullet?
Image: Bitcoin is dead; long live blockchain. To be fair, bitcoin, the much-hyped virtual currency, is hardly ready to fade into oblivion. The technology underlying those online exchanges, however, is poised to become the hottest technology to hit the financial world in years, albeit not without significant business and regulatory ...
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Climate change continues to be a disclosure concern
While pundits and true believers on both sides of the environmental fence bicker over climate change, public companies may want to focus their attention on specific developments that could influence their disclosure regime and what they quantify as material information for investors. Questions they should be asking: whether state officials ...
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Compliance lessons from VimpelCom
Image: Ethics, compliance, and audit executives have yet another real-life bribery case to add to their growing library of epic anti-corruption compliance failures—this one resulting in the sixth largest Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement action of all time. “This case demonstrates a failure of internal controls at every turn,” says ...
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Healthcare, ransomware, and effective cyber-security hygiene
Imagine this: You’re a large healthcare provider whose staff is having trouble accessing vital records in your hospital’s computer network. Your IT department begins an immediate investigation and determines the cause to be a malware attack. Worse yet, the attackers are demanding ransom to obtain the decryption key. How do ...
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Evolving your identity management program: Six cautionary considerations
For compliance professionals in regulated industries, there’s perhaps no greater challenge than identity management. Call it a program, a best practice or simply a daily struggle to account for all users and all the systems to which they have access—identity management is a beast that is tough to tame.
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Q&A: Coping with the speed of change within internal audit
Image: As the world of internal audit is swiftly changing, Doug Anderson, former corporate auditor for Dow Chemical and new managing director for CAE solutions for the Institute of Internal Auditors, speaks to the challenges of helping to drive internal audit to be more forward-looking, how to properly harness the ...
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How internal audit can help drive corporate culture
Traditional notions of audit are focused on verifying quantified data, but can audit provide that same benefit in the ether space of business, verifying the presence or absence of intangible characteristics? The internal audit profession is starting to believe it is possible, and its leaders are calling on audit executives ...
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Q&A with Wolters Kluwer’s Barbara Boehler: What is a “culture of compliance,” anyway?
Image: A term of the moment in regulatory circles is “culture of compliance,” a desire for firms to move beyond check-the-box rules and compliance demands by making good behavior part of their corporate zeitgeist. We spoke to Barbara Boehler, a regulatory compliance expert at Wolters Kluwer, about how to define ...
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Audit committees discuss the growing demand for disclosure
Image: With proxy season just around the corner, audit committees are discussing how to answer growing demand for more disclosure—and whether the demand for more information is really a demand for more robust oversight of auditors. “There is clearly an increase in at least the dialogue that audit committees are ...
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ArticleMitigating third-party risks
Most companies by now understand the escalating risks that third parties pose to their business and are ramping up their third-party risk management efforts accordingly. Even still, many struggle with how to achieve full transparency into the breadth and depth of their third parties, exposing themselves to significant legal and ...
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U.K. ruling expands scope of anti-corruption enforcement
Image: In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the Criminal Division of the U.K. Court of Appeal ruled that bribery of foreign officials was, indeed, illegal prior to 2002, marking a notable victory for the Serious Fraud Office in its escalating battle against bribery and corruption. ““Anybody thinking that prosecution under these pre-Bribery ...