Internal Controls

This month, Compliance Week and the Open Compliance and Ethics Group present the latest installment of our regular series, “GRC Illustrated.” The interactive series—which features visual representations of key governance, risk, and compliance initiatives—is intended to help readers understand how to put principles into practice (Click here for information on the series). In this month’s […]

As Corporate America awaits action on changes to improve the implementation of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, critics who say the high cost of compliance and the stringent regulatory environment are hurting U.S. competitiveness have stepped up public pressure on Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ease those burdens. Both the Treasury […]

As regulators tell the market and Corporate America to focus more on risk in implementing Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, they have one key mission to fulfill first: Define “risk.” The Securities Exchange Commission has proposed new guidance for corporate managements and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has drafted new audit rules intended to direct the market […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed guidance for management on implementing Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley drew hundreds of comments from Corporate America and the public, signaling that debate over how best to amend compliance burdens for the law is still far from over. The SEC wants to provide guidance that would allow companies to scale […]

As audit regulators now begin considering feedback to their proposed rewrite of rules governing audits of internal control over financial reporting, they are confronted with the ongoing tension between rules and principles—to give more or less guidance and to outline more or fewer prescriptive thresholds. With the public-comment period now closed on the proposed new […]

At the request of subscribers, Compliance Week offers a Remediation Center, in which readers can submit questions—anonymously—to securities and accounting experts. Compliance Week’s editors will review all questions and then submit them—confidentially, of course—to specialists who can address the issues. The questions and responses will then be reprinted in a future edition of Compliance Week. […]

In the movie, “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a self-absorbed, egotistical, and determinedly obnoxious Pittsburgh TV weatherman, who finds himself in Punxsutawney, Pa., to cover Groundhog Day. Phil doesn’t like this assignment, but his unwelcome endeavor turns into a spectacular nightmare, as he’s required to repeat Groundhog Day over and over again until […]

The enormous spike in auditing fees in the last three years may largely stem from reasons that have nothing to do with Sarbanes-Oxley, but rather from much more aggressive auditing overall, even for non-accelerated filers that have not yet encountered Section 404’s provisions over internal controls. New research shows that audit-related fees for accelerated filers […]