Internal Controls

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. […]

No one disputes that companies need IT tools to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and monitor internal controls—but in some cases, the tools themselves are what stand in the way of SOX compliance. In a Compliance Week analysis of 400 companies disclosing material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting, 52 pointed to their IT systems as […]

Convergence has long been a buzzword among business executives seeking more cost-effective ways to cope with compliance regulations while managing their enterprises’ risks. As Compliance Week has covered extensively over the past four years, companies have been seeking a unified strategy for risk and compliance. The “holistic” initiative has gotten a big push over the […]

This guest column is one in a series of first-hand accounts written by senior executives at U.S. public companies. The goal of these columns is to provide “lessons learned” during the implementation of various governance and compliance programs. For additional guest columns, and for submission guidelines and contact information, click here. WellPoint, Inc., a $45 […]

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. […]

Whether the fault lies with poor attitude or poor execution, four years after Sarbanes-Oxley was passed to galvanize the spirit of corporate governance, some companies are still painfully out of tune on that point. In a Compliance Week analysis of 2005 material weakness disclosures, 20 of the 400 companies surveyed confessed to internal control problems […]

Companies are cheering the Securities and Exchange Commission’s move to delay the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley’s Section 404 for non-accelerated filers, even as some continue to press the SEC to do more to ease the compliance burden. In August, the SEC moved to further extend the deadline for non-accelerated filers to comply with Section 404, giving […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has received an earful from the public about the need for more guidance to companies on how to assess internal controls over financial reporting, even as opinions differ deeply on what form that guidance should take and exactly what issues it should address. The SEC announced in July that it […]

Corporate America’s finance staff now has some hard evidence for their bosses, regulators and investors to support recurring claims of an overwhelming workload. The internal controls over financial reporting aren’t what they should be, and a shortage of skilled personnel is the most common cause. According to a Compliance Week analysis of the disclosures at […]