Matt Kelly

We don’t write about corporate sustainability all that much around here because, well, nobody in Washington had been doing all that much about sustainability either. Now that may change. A recent legal bulletin from McGuire Woods notes that Lisa Jackson, the Obama Administration’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has agreed to reconsider whether […]

Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of The X Files. Little did I know that the central tenets of that program—distrust, cynicism, and a deep suspicion that people in Washington are controlled by aliens—would be so useful when analyzing the economic stimulus bill. Compliance officers and corporate secretaries in the financial sector […]

Look, I’m all for skewering overpaid CEOs while they’re still alive and roasting them over an open flame. But could we at least put a little thought into the process? That seems to be the missing element in the Obama Administration’s new rules for executive compensation. I appreciate the spirit behind them, and I’m sure […]

Last week, I had the pleasure of moderating a roundtable forum in New York on supply chain compliance, and the debate turned to a theme I often hear at these discussions: How far should your compliance program go to please government regulators? On one side were the realists, arguing that no compliance program can stop […]

I always enjoy spending time with Compliance Week readers—especially these days, when the alternative is to sit around reading economic news. Not long ago I had just such a chance: one of our Editorial Roundtables, where we invite a dozen compliance executives to get together and talk shop. We met at an upscale hotel in […]

All you chief compliance officers with hotshot deputies, here’s your chance to do something nice for them so they won’t decamp to greener pastures: The Millstein Center for Corporate Governance is accepting nominations for its second annual Rising Stars of Corporate Governance award. The award recognizes up-and-coming players in corporate governance, and is open to […]

To my thinking, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission is good at his job if investors are protected from dangerous risks (fraud or otherwise) during his tenure. By that yardstick, Christopher Cox was not a good chairman of the SEC. Still, even as many people celebrate Cox’s departure from the SEC last week, […]

By now, everyone knows that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is in ill health. This is a shame for several reasons: He is a human being, and has loved ones worried about him; Apple makes fantastic products, and Jobs has been central to that; He and Apple’s board have become a textbook example of how […]

Another week, another report that compliance departments are going to feel the squeeze in 2009. This latest dollop of painful news comes from the Health Care Compliance Association and the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, who published their 11-page survey of compliance officers last week. Among the more unpleasant findings: 85 percent of respondents […]