As you have already seen from the cover of this monthโs magazine, Compliance Week and Crowe Horwath recently hosted an editorial roundtable about every compliance and financial reporting executiveโs favorite topic: fraud. The discussion was excellent and you can read the full coverage of the event on pages 44-47, but I do want to share […]
Matt Kelly
The Regulator Dilemma: No Right Answer
I hosted another of our Compliance Week editorial roundtables last week, this time co-hosted by Deloitte and looking particularly at compliance challenges in the pharmaceutical sector. At first I wasnโt sure how the discussion might unfold; Compliance Week normally doesnโt delve too deeply into any single industryโs compliance regime, because each sector has unique burdens […]
Judge Uncorks True Feelings About Compliance Monitors
God, I love it when a federal judge goes off-script. Most events in federal court are terribly dull, the carefully scripted culmination of legal briefs fired back and forth among various parties for years. But once in a great while, a judge goes a little nutsโas happened last week with the new hero of compliance […]
Moves and Counter-Moves on the Dodd Bill
Sen. James DeMint, R-S.C., has promised to introduce an amendment to the Senateโs proposed regulatory reform bill that would exempt non-accelerated filers from compliance with Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. A Section 404(b) exemption for non-accelerated filers was notably absent from the reform bill unveiled by Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, […]
Dissecting the Dodd Bill
The long-awaited regulatory reform bill from Sen. Christopher Dodd finally landed with a ponderous thump on desks across Washington, Wall Street and America this afternoon. It clocks in at 1,336 pages, which gives it more physical heft than the reform bill passed by the House (1,289 pages) last December. The bill will inevitably have more […]
Compliance Book of the Month: Money for Nothing
The book Money for Nothing can be summed up in one sentence: The boards running corporations in America today are ineffective. But while that sentence may be accurate, it is not news to corporate compliance and governance officers, so those of you looking for a more substantive analysis or solutions to the governance problems you […]
Previewing Compliance Week 2010
Every spring I write an editorial announcing the lineup of our annual Compliance Week lineup. As you might imagine, last yearโs conference, in the shadow of recession and financial crisis, had a touch of gallows humor to the whole affair. I am happy, and more than a little surprised, to report that our 2010 conference […]
Restatements Continue to Drop; All Hail SOX
Yet again, the chorus of Sarbanes-Oxley critics out there have been shouted down by one bald fact: SOX compliance prevents financial restatements. According to a new study due out this week from Audit Analytics, restatements fell for the third year in a row in 2009, from 923 in 2008 to 674 last year. The restatements […]
Editorial: Hope, Compliance Spring Eternal
Every spring I write an editorial announcing the lineup of our annual Compliance Week lineup. As you might imagine, last yearโs conference, in the shadow of recession and financial crisis, had a touch of gallows humor to the whole affair. I am happy, and more than a little surprised, to report that our 2010 conference […]
The Depressing Tone of Bank of America
Sometimes corporate leaders step up and do the simple, ethical thing, and their tone at the top is a harmonized chorus delightful to hear. Sometimes they do the wrong thing, and their tone is more like a tribal screech of self-interest. And then there is the messy, jangling, cacophonous governance meltdown otherwise known as Bank […]


