Richard Meyer

One might assume that because Europe is so similar to the United States in so many ways, compliance issues would not be too difficult in a trans-Atlantic corporate merger. That assumption would cost you dearly. Indeed, experts say, cross-border mergers are rife with legal risks and compliance minefields that can make a transaction considerably more […]

If the words “offshore entity” inspire dreams of Caribbean islands and easy compliance because, well, there are hardly any tax or governance rules to comply with—you may want to wake up to reality. That reality is that there are a dwindling number of benefits to incorporating in offshore tax havens such as Bermuda or the […]

Cheap is very often expensive. That’s the lesson being learned again by companies outsourcing production to China. With the recent spate of food contamination and other product scares—from melamine in pet food to lead-painted Thomas the Tank Engine toys to toxic cough syrup—many companies in the United States are being advised to do what they […]

The next time you take a client in China out to dinner, you may want to bring your attorney along. You might need his help ordering. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a cornerstone of antibribery legislation in the United States and increasingly around the world, as prosecutors here try to extend the scope of […]

If ever Congress tells you to do your civic duty and testify at one of its investigations, always remember: your first business duty should be to try to get out of it. Fraser “The answer is, `Sorry we can’t make it,’” Mary Ellen Fraser, a partner at the law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge, told […]

If you only consider “risks” to be those of the financial type, you are only confronting the most easily identifiable of threats—and you’re missing many more risks that should be addressed, according to a panel of risk-management experts at Compliance Week 2007. “Our risk management process would be lacking if it were just financial,” said […]

Michelle Banks, senior vice president and general counsel at retailer Gap, won the admiration of many of her compliance colleagues yesterday at Compliance Week 2007. The trick that drew kudos from fellow panel members discussing how to implement enterprise risk management was the efficient distillation of risk, and the effective presentation of that risk to […]

Richard Steinberg, founder of Steinberg Governance Advisors and a Compliance Week columnist, says there’s a difference between risk assessment and enterprise risk management—and that understanding this difference is key to being successful at the latter. Steinberg “Risk assessment is a snapshot; ERM is ongoing,” Steinberg said today at Compliance Week’s 2007 conference in Washington. “ERM […]