Matt Kelly

I can’t help but read about the governance farce happening at JC Penney these days and think: Anyone with a pulse can see the characters involved aren’t setting a good tone at the top for a once-respectable retailer. They are screeching at each other while the rest of the business wonders who will be unemployed next. […]

Last week I was looking for a powerful news hook to announce the agenda for Compliance Week West—our privacy and Big Data summit, to be held Nov. 14-15 in Silicon Valley. A group of Russian and Ukrainian hackers, freshly indicted by the feds in New Jersey, delivered exactly what I needed. “Oh yeah, that’s really […]

Last week I had the privilege of hosting another Compliance Week editorial roundtable, this time in Los Angeles to talk about the challenges of “cultivating good compliance leaders”—both the chief compliance officers of tomorrow, and the broader workforce of the future that will need to think about good ethics and corporate conduct more often. The […]

My acquaintance at the other end of the phone was complaining to me about facilitation payments. I won’t identify him by name for this column and, frankly, what’s the point? Every compliance executive complains to me about facilitation payments, and rightly so. “The situation is preposterous,” my friend said. “At least in the United States […]

Let’s parse the palace intrigue that unfolded in the Senate yesterday properly: Democrats won a big victory with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Republicans won a minor, minor victory with the National Labor Relations Board. You, the compliance professional who must worry about both these agencies, won nothing. After all, Republicans’ chief compliant about […]

Well, that’s one way to do a cost-benefit analysis. For CFOs, corporate controllers, audit firm partners, and other financial reporting executives everywhere, the news out of Washington last week was the House of Representatives’ vote to bar the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board from even considering the idea of requiring companies to rotate audit firms. […]

What’s that, you say? You want yet another practical example of how ethical conduct can help your business, to convince that skeptical board member or business unit leader? Look no further than the city of London today. There, two things happened this morning. First Transparency International released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, a sweeping study […]

I spent part of July 4th weekend in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and was hiking up Mount Washington on Saturday afternoon when someone told me the news: an airliner had just crashed at San Francisco International Airport. What? I thought to myself. An airline crash, here in the United States? When was the […]

Consolidation continues at the Big 4 accounting firms—at least among the firms’ names, anyway. Fresh off the arrival of a new global CEO this week, the venerable Ernst & Young announced that it will henceforth abbreviate itself to a simple “EY.” Incoming chief Mark Weinberger, who started work July 1, said the change—complete with new […]