LONDONโI met my spy monitoring the Serious Fraud Office this week at his offices in Westminster. I had been in London for four days already, seeing compliance officers and audit partners and software vendors and barristers. My mission was to better understand the challenges of running a compliance program in the United Kingdom and in […]
Matt Kelly
MF Global: Tone Deaf at the Top, and Then Disaster
I had expected to spend this weekend digesting the latest report on the demise of MF Global, a 174-page post-mortem published last week by the trustee in charge of investigating how MF Global managed to lose $1.2 billion of customer money before it went bankrupt in October 2011. For better or worse, however, compliance and […]
All the Latest on All the Compliance Week Conferences
The Compliance Week 2013 conference is nearing the home stretchโand boy, do we have some news for you about it. Foremost, we have launched a new website for the annual conference (happening May 20-22, in Washington, D.C.) that has our expanded agenda and latest list of speakers. You can see the dozens of sessions we […]
Report: GRC Vendor Consolidation Continues
Consolidation among software vendors in the governance, risk, and compliance sector seems to happen in waves that arrive every few years, and the latest wave seems to be upon us right now. So says a report from Berkery Noyes, an investment banking firm that tracks these things. The pace of merger activity is rising, as […]
Putting Big Data Principles to Work in Audit & Compliance
Readers of these pages will know that Compliance Week closely follows the idea of Big Data. (Don’t miss our virtual conference on ethics and compliance risks in Big Data, happening Wednesday, March 27.) Yes, software vendors and consultants have spun up quite a bit of hype around the subject, but nevertheless, Big Data today is […]
A Bracket-Based Approach to Ethics & Compliance
Any NCAA Final Four enthusiasts looking for some way to connect the basketball playoffs to ethics and compliance, rest easyโone of Compliance Week’s many spies has found it. We were recently tipped off to the existence of the โMarch Madness Compliance Risk Assessment Bracket,โ penned by Ryan McConnell, a former federal prosecutor who has since […]
Anti-Corruption Enthusiasts, We Need Your Help!
Calling all FCPA and anti-corruption enthusiasts, Compliance Week needs your help! Compliance Week and Kroll Advisory have teamed up to undertake a major survey on corporate anti-corruption programs, and we’re asking compliance executives to participate. The survey itselfโthe 2013 โGlobal Anti-Bribery Benchmarking Reportโโcan be found here: http://bit.ly/Ynhe66. The survey should take no more than 20 […]
The Merits & Risks of Automating Regulatory Compliance
There I was last week, talking with my friend the Vendor, as he sat across a conference room table from me smartly describing his software’s approach to regulatory compliance. And actually, his idea was pretty smart. Start with the obvious, he said. Highly regulated industriesโmostly finance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and energyโhave exhaustive compliance demands. Regulators have […]
Two Tales of Ethics, Compliance, and Compensation
We saw two instances of executive compensation intersecting with corporate ethics and compliance last week. Alas, neither one was much cheer for those seeking a kindler, gentler path forward for that most difficult of subjects. First was news of the new approach to executive pay at Citigroup. The plan is admirable in its goal: to […]
Putting Ethics & Values Around Big Data
Next month Compliance Week will be hosting a virtual conference on Big Data. Part of my job here is to recruit high-caliber speakers to talk about various slices of that admittedly broad subject, and hence I ended up on the phone last week with Kord Davis. Davis is author of the book Ethics of Big […]


