The Compliance Week Europe conference is gearing up for action later this fall, so before you European compliance professionals take the summer off, take note—we are looking for speakers again! This is the second annual Compliance Week Europe conference, happening Oct. 13-14 in Brussels. Our inaugural Europe conference last year had more than 130 attendees, […]
Matt Kelly
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Managing Cyber-Security Risk: Who Cares, and Who Doesn’t
I’m glad that SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar raised the alarm about cyber-security risks last week. The question is whether anyone will hear it, and I fear the answer is no. In some ways Aguilar’s speech was important. He is an unofficial stalking horse for policy at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where positions he stakes […]
Posted inEthics & Culture
The Corporate Value That Wrecked GM
Yes, yes, yes—everyone in the universe is complaining about General Motors, and the disastrous corporate culture there that led staffers to keep critical information from the board about ignition failures in the Chevrolet Cobalt. In just a few keystrokes you can find plenty of columns about whether the chief compliance officer should have played a […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Pre-Gaming the Compliance Week 2014 Conference
The Compliance Week 2014 conference happens this week, and as usual we’ll have more than 500 compliance officers, audit executives, regulators, and other leading thinkers talking shop on all things ethics & compliance. Check our website frequently for the latest updates, since we’ll be posting lots of them. Meanwhile, as always, here are my personal […]
Posted inEthics & Culture
More Evidence That Compliance & Ethics Education Clash
Another dispatch from academia, supporting what most compliance officers already suspect: ethics & compliance programs still aren’t working that well. This time the research comes from Max Bazerman, Ting Zhang, and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. Their paper “Morality Rebooted: Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs,” published April 24, takes a wide-ranging look at “values-oriented” […]
Posted inAnti-Bribery
Walmart Compliance Reforms, Part II: Goal Setting
In my last post about Walmart’s compliance reforms, we looked at how Walmart built a centralized, independent compliance function and decided its 14 key responsibilities worldwide. Now let’s look at how the company set specific compliance objectives and focused on achieving them. Jorgensen started with the audit committee. In its 2013 proxy statement filed one […]
Posted inAnti-Bribery
Walmart Outlines Compliance Reforms (Part I)
For more than a year, the compliance community has wondered exactly how Walmart would revamp its ethics & compliance operations to recover from the black eye the company received when news broke of extensive bribery activity in Latin America and elsewhere. Well, now we’re getting some answers. This week Walmart filed its annual proxy statement, […]
Posted inInternal Controls
When ‘Holding Executives Accountable’ Hits Home
For several years now, Compliance Week has reported the speeches from regulators vowing to pursue “gatekeepers” of corporate conduct. Leaders from the Justice Department, U.S. attorney offices, the Securities and Exchange Commission—they’ve all made relatively the same promise, to hold accountable the CEOs, board directors, general counsels, and senior executives who should have stopped corporate […]
Posted inEthics & Culture
Conduct Versus Bureacracy, and Bureaucracy Won
Corporations always say they want to be ethical businesses—and then the markets and Washington get involved, and everything goes to pieces. That uncomfortable truth about ethics & compliance is very much on display these days. Let’s start with Caterpillar, whose senior tax and finance executives appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last week […]
Posted inData Privacy
More Struggles on Cyber-Security
Let’s talk about cyber-security risks. After all, everyone else is. The Securities and Exchange Commission talked about the issue for five hours last week, at its much-anticipated cyber-security roundtable. The Center for Audit Quality published guidance on cyber-security risks one day before the SEC’s confab, diplomatically but firmly stating that external auditors are not responsible […]