Earlier this month I attended Financial Executives International’s annual conference on current reporting issues. FEI’s conference is always good for a sense of the latest, most pressing headaches that financial reporting departments are worried about—but this time around, the latest and most pressing headache is actually one that has been irritating corporate accounting and legal […]
Matt Kelly
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
The Price of Strong Board Oversight
Once upon a time, serving as a corporate board director was a prestigious thing. Today, thanks to the intense burdens of monitoring and governance we’ve piled onto boards generally and independent directors specifically, board service is more like a pain in the backside. And now some clever academics have tried to quantify precisely how much […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Compliance Week 2011: Preliminary Thoughts
Just wanted to file another of my occasional updates about the Compliance Week 2011 annual conference. The conference itself won’t happen until May 23-25, 2011, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. You’re still able and welcome to register now at a discounted rate through the rest of this year, but in addition, I want […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
A Rising Global Economy Lifts All FCPA Risks
Compliance officers, consider youselves caught in the crossfire of the Currency Wars. Those battles, of course, are being fought by finance ministers and central bankers around the world, as they all scramble to ensure that their own nation’s currency is weak enough to inflate demand for its exports. We’ve seen China keep the yuan at […]
Posted inTechnology
When Cloud Computing and Compliance Collide
Fellow compliance thinkers, I have seen the future—or more precisely, I have seen the Next Big Idea coming to a corporation near you, sure to add a new dimension of complexity to the already complex world of ethics, compliance and financial reporting we encounter every day. I have, at long last, grasped what this “cloud […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Compliance Week 2011? Funny You Should Ask …
Why yes, we have indeed begun laying the groundwork for our Compliance Week 2011 conference—the Davos of compliance, the gathering for good governance, the epicenter of ethics. I’m pleased to give you our first status report. As usual, we will hold our annual conference (six years running) at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. This […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Editorial: The Case for Governance Laws: Slow, Tortuous—and Worthwhile
I have long argued on these pages that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as irritating as it may be for corporate compliance and financial reporting executives, achieves its intended goal: to reduce the frequency of financial restatements that harm the investing public. We first saw evidence along those lines in 2007, when the total number of restatements […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
A Tale of Two Strategies for SOX Compliance
Not often do I see two interesting corporate announcements about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in the same morning, but it happened earlier today. First, the Australian company Alloy Steel International told the word that it plans to de-register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Why? Compliance costs. Specifically the company singled out the infamous Section 404(b) of […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
Why Complexity Triumphs Almost Every Time
Well of course I went to see “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” this weekend. I’m the editor of a magazine that writes about securities regulation and ethical business conduct. How could I not go see it? Unfortunately, watching the film was a hardship assignment. It’s awful. The plot is a dull morality play, pinned to […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
The Fall Rulemaking Season Begins
Well, autumn is here and everyone is back to work, including all your regulators in Washington. That means all those rules promised in the Dodd-Frank Act passed this summer will now start appearing, and compliance departments should plan accordingly. One of the most notable new rules has already arrived: shareholder access to the proxy statement, […]
