Neil Baker

Expect 2009 to be a hectic year for international corporate governance and compliance. In Britain, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, many companies are still adjusting to the reforms ushered in by the corporate failures of 2002. Now they’ll also need to brace themselves for the expected new wave of regulation, aimed at fixing problems exposed by […]

The European Commission has decided not to make unilateral changes to the way that the fair-value rules in International Financial Reporting Standards are applied in Europe—an idea that would have undermined the authority of the International Accounting Standards Board. Instead, the Commission will accept the fair-value changes that IASB has made already—changes that critics say […]

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso has asked a panel of experts to suggest “far-reaching proposals” to improve cross-border securities regulation within the European Union. The aim is to fix failings exposed by the credit crunch. The EU already has the Committee of European Securities Regulators, charged with improving supervision, but “more is clearly needed,” […]

British financial firms face a tougher regulatory environment after Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged to “clean up” business practices in the City of London. Speaking in the days after his government had to engineer a shotgun wedding between two of the country’s largest banks— Lloyds TSB and HBOS—Brown said he would introduce new laws and […]

Public companies in the European Union’s 27 member states should be complying with “EuroSox” by the end of the summer to establish a pan-European framework for governance and financial reporting akin to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States. At least, that’s the theory, anyway. EU nations were supposed to implement two directives this year […]

Non-executive directors at British companies are still enjoying tidy pay rises, but the rate of increase has leveled off and directors are expected to work harder for their money, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The percentage growth in non-executive pay slowed again last year, and companies expect their non-execs to work longer hours and […]

The British Accounting Standards Board’s controversial proposals to change the way companies treat pension liabilities have come in for further criticism, this time from the Association of Corporate Treasurers, which says the Board has overstepped its bounds. A key plank of the ASB’s suggested reforms would lead to a massive increase in the liabilities companies […]

Britain’s Financial Reporting Council has published guidance for company directors on when and how to agree on liability limits with their auditors. Under changes to British corporate law that took effect in April, auditors and their clients can negotiate liability caps to a limit that is “fair and reasonable in all circumstances.” But the company […]

Information security and mishandling of personal information are increasingly important risk areas for organizations, and two reports on a massive data disaster at a U.K. government department show how badly things can go wrong. The reports cited Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, the British tax authority, for its “deplorable failures” to comply with data protection […]