Matt Kelly

I haven’t posted much here about the Compliance Week 2013 annual conference lately, but rest assured that we’re working furiously to put the final touches on our agenda, speakers, and other special tweaks to make the conference as relevant and worthwhile for you as it has been every year. A few updates worth noting now… […]

Mary Jo White is an excellent nominee to keep the Securities and Exchange Commission on the same path it has been following for the last four years. Unfortunately for Corporate America, that path is actually twofold: vigorous enforcement of securities law on one hand, and uncertainty about everything else on the other. Now, I don’t […]

If you’re going to read one book at the start of this year to improve your understanding of the world and the compliance professional’s role in it, read The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. It’s been on the best seller list since its debut last September, and I finally opened a copy the […]

“Let me tell you what really drives me crazy,” the compliance officer on the other end of the phone told me. We were speaking the other week, chatting about possible ideas for the Compliance Week 2013 conference. Well, sure you can tell me what drives you crazy, I said, but pick one subject and focus […]

And here we go: Shareholder activism coming to the firearms business, thanks to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Yesterday I noted on Twitter that Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm, was selling off the Freedom Group International firearms business it owns and that divestiture may be the New New Thing for shareholder […]

Retailers, marketers, IT executives, and privacy officers spend quite a bit of time wondering why so many members of the public insist on divulging immensely personal (and valuable) details about themselves online. Now a recent article from Harvard Business School will leave you even more unsettled: the more slap-dash and downright sketchy a website looks, […]

Compliance Week held its most recent editorial roundtable last week in Washington, where we gathered a dozen compliance executives to talk about one of the most important elements of an effective ethics and compliance program—corporate culture. As usual, we will have full coverage of that discussion in an upcoming edition of our weekly newsletter. For […]

Here’s the unspoken truth about International Financial Reporting Standards: there are many solid, respectable, intelligent reasons why a country might want to adopt IFRS—and none of them apply to the United States. Don’t take my word for it; listen to Julie Erhardt, deputy chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who delivered a speech […]

Last week L’Oreal Corp. announced that it will acquire a smaller makeup company called Urban Decay. Financially the deal seems sensible enough; the private equity firm that owns Urban Decay now bought the business in 2009, annual sales are somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 million, and the purchase price, officially undisclosed, is rumored to […]