Late last year I was on a conference call, hashing out some ideas for sessions to hold at the Compliance Week 2011 conference. On the phone was Scott Giordano, general manager of the GRC software vendor Mitratech. I asked him what a good subject would be. “Policy management!” he said. “Just look at those enhanced […]
Matt Kelly
Posted inFrom the Archive
More Thoughts on Where Compliance and Ethics Come From
Last week I had the privilege of hosting another Compliance Week editorial roundtable, this time co-hosted with Crowe Horwath in Dallas to talk about corporate ethics. We’ll have a complete article as usual on that discussion in an upcoming edition, but for now I’d like to share a few personal observations. Where ethics functions come […]
Posted inEthics & Culture
Ethics, Compliance, and Company Size
Like so much else on Twitter, the question shot out of nowhere and raced across my attention span: Are ethics and compliance harder to achieve at large companies, or easier? And like so much else on Twitter, I shot back an answer without really thinking: “Ethics is harder at large companies; compliance is harder at […]
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World to Renault: J’accuse!
J’accuse! Sorry—I’ve always wanted to start a column with those words. “J’accuse,” of course, is French for “I accuse,” and is the title of a famous essay written by Emile Zola in 1898. Zola’s letter was a public rally to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer falsely accused and convicted of espionage […]
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Actions Have Consequences
Two tales from the front lines… First, as you can see from our lead story this week, I recently co-hosted another Compliance Week editorial roundtable—this time in Houston, with Deloitte, to explore how the Dodd-Frank Act is affecting the oil and gas industry. As usual, we opened our conversation by going around the room and […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Introducing the State of Compliance Survey
I field many questions from my perch as editor of Compliance Week, but one trumps all the others. It varies from person to person, but inevitably it runs along the lines of: “I’m looking for some information about how other companies manage their compliance departments. Can you help me?” Well, at long last, this spring […]
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SEC Budget Crisis Looms Large
We saw a rare thing in the regulatory world on Friday: growth in the Securities and Exchange Commission. To be clear, that “growth” was the hiring of precisely one person: Sean McKessy, who will direct the new Whistleblower Office in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. But growth it is. For anyone who deals with the […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
When Compliance and Technology Collide
Imagine a world where your IT systems automatically classify all your customers’ financial information as high-security data. The corporate network can recognize it as such, and logs every instance where that type of data is passed outside the company to an unauthorized recipient. An alert then appears in your email in-box or GRC dashboard telling […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Egypt’s Pyramid Scheme Unravels
Like most people, I’ve been generally supportive of the Egyptian revolution we’ve all been watching for the last two weeks. Can’t say I’ll stick with my idea to see the Pyramids on vacation later this summer, but overall as an American I tend to like democratic impulses bursting into the world scene. From a more […]
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Latest on Whistleblower Rules: Nothing Good
Few issues burn up my phone lines and email box these days as much as the new whistleblower bounty rules soon to come from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little surprise, then, that when SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami appeared at the Securities Regulation Institute’s annual conference last week, the new whistleblower rules were discussed […]
