Articles | Compliance Week – Page 291
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PCAOB Inspection Data: Shifting Standards, Shifting Insights
Image: If you want to be panicky or cynical about audit firms’ performance, citing failure rates in PCAOB inspection reports is a great way to do it. The truth is more complex. In Part II of our series looking at PCAOB inspection data, we delve into how inspections have changed ...
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Smarter Approaches to Regulatory Change Management
Image: New regulations gush like a flood these days, forcing compliance officers to think of new ways to manage the current. Inside, we look at the IT strategies necessary to digest regulatory changes, plus the policy and procedure techniques to involve more parts of the enterprise. “It needs to be ...
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Q&A: Talking Insurance Industry Compliance
Image: As part of our occasional series of conversations with compliance executives, we caught up with Lee Augsburger, chief ethics and compliance officer at Prudential Financial and vice chairman of the newly established Global Insurance Chief Compliance Officers Forum. Inside, Augsburger talks about the objectives of the group and how ...
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Dodd-Frank’s Diversity Disclosures Draw Nearer
Image: While you were worrying about conflict minerals, CEO pay ratios, and the Volcker Rule, another disclosure requirement from the Dodd-Frank Act has been quietly approaching. Any day now, regulators hint, final rules will emerge for how companies assess and report workforce diversity. “A lot of people just weren’t paying ...
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Monitoring Your Anti-Retaliation Program
Complaints of whistleblower retaliation are a persistent problem in Corporate America, and all the more irritating for companies that may believe they have solid anti-retaliation programs in place. Inside, we walk through the harder part of anti-retaliation efforts: not just creating the policy, but working with HR and line managers ...
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Managing the Risky Business of Loyalty Programs
As the regulatory focus on data security expands, companies that offer customer loyalty programs should review them for red flags. How the data is stored, protected, and segmented is ripe for scrutiny, experts warn. Poorly designed loyalty programs could run afoul of antitrust laws, torpedo a merger, violate HIPAA, or ...
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Conflict Minerals, Year 2: The Auditing Challenge
Few companies so far have addressed the audit requirement in the SEC’s Conflict Minerals Rule, although that will likely change as the June deadline for your second year’s filings approaches.
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NLRB’s Brain-Dump on Lawful Company Policies
Image: The National Labor Relations Board has churned out an extensive piece of guidance on what makes a company policy lawful or not, on everything from making disparaging comments (often can’t be forbidden) to talking with the media or regulators (forget about forbidding it) and many more. “The memo is ...
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The Latest State of Affairs on Whistleblower Claims
Image: A final rule from OSHA has smoothed the path for employees to file whistleblower retaliation claims under the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts and put companies in a more difficult spot to defend themselves. “The final rule reinforces that these types of anti-retaliation provisions are here to stay,” says Daniel ...
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PCAOB Inspection Reports at 5: What Can We Learn
The compliance and audit community have pored over PCAOB inspection data on audit firms for five years now. What does the data tell us, really? This week Compliance Week begins a special series looking at the insights that the inspection process can give—starting with how much value the disclosure of ...
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Managing Data Security and Privacy Risks 2.0
Image: Modern technology allows powerful employee monitoring ability to sharpen business performance and even support compliance efforts. The bad news: Those technologies also spawn a new set of data security risks to keep compliance officers busy. “The key is trying to strike a balance between the employee’s personal privacy interests ...
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High Court Ruling Is Boon for Regulators, Snare for Business
Image: Compliance officers worried about regulatory change, prepare yourself: The Supreme Court’s ruling to give agencies more leeway in re-interpreting rules does you no favors. Today’s estranged Washington politics means regulators are bound to try re-interpretation for the sake of expedient rulemaking, and CCOs will need to be vigilant. “This ...
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Human Trafficking Compliance Arrives for Federal Contractors
Image: Starting this month, government contractors must ensure that their supply chain is free of human-trafficking activities. The thicket of new requirements isn’t too different conceptually from other compliance obligations, but the nuances of human-trafficking risk will pose some tricky policy challenges. Companies previously might not have thought much about ...
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Report Spotlights the Underbelly of ‘Audit Politics’
Image: A new report finds corporate political pressure on chief audit executives to alter audit plans or results is “extensive and pervasive,” and it underlines the need for audit professionals to master the art of office politics. “We were really surprised by the extent of pressure,” says Larry Rittenberg, co-author ...
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Putting All of That Talent to Work Smartly
Amid a tough climate of regulatory enforcement and an explosion of new rules after the financial crisis, many large companies—especially financial institutions—have beefed up their staffing on risk and compliance. But is more always better? While the investment sends a message, more boots on the ground may just step on ...
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Mitigating FCPA Risks in Pharma, Med Device Sectors
Image: SEC Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney recently dropped new hints on FCPA risks for pharma and medical devices, plus suggestions on how to avoid those risks. “Our FCPA focus obviously covers many industries,” he said. “But the pharma industry is one on which we have been particularly focused in recent ...
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Preparing Your Board for Cyber-Security Oversight
Every board knows its company will fall victim to a cyber-attack and, worse, that the board will need to clean up the mess and superintend the fallout. This week, guest columnist John Stark, a long-time student of cyber-security risks, breaks down the fundamentals any board must establish for cyber-security, and ...
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Momentum Grows for Small Companies & Capital Markets
The SEC is exploring new ways to fulfill its mission to facilitate capital formation for small- and medium-sized companies. While uncertainty still surrounds capital formation efforts included in the JOBS Act, momentum is growing to revisit the SEC’s traditional definition of an accredited investor, and to create new “venture exchanges” ...
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Audit Voices Try to Calm Tensions on Evidence
Image: Leaders of the auditing world are calling for a truce in arguments between internal and external auditors over how much evidence external auditors should collect themselves while scrutinizing internal controls—and are calling on audit committees to intervene earlier to prevent such disputes. “Essential value will be lost if external ...
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Blurred Lines: How to Handle Informal SEC Communications
When the SEC sends a formal inquiry into your company’s operations, you know you have a problem to be handled in strict ways. So what about when the SEC delivers an “informal” request—and all those speeches and opinions, for that matter, that can sound an awful lot like formal guidance ...