Regulatory Enforcement

Microsoft became the latest company to drop a long-standing practice of distributing its full quarterly financial results via newswire in favor of issuing a shorter release pointing people to its investor relations Website to find them. The move, announced in advance of the software giant’s first-quarter fiscal 2011 results on Oct. 28, puts Microsoft in […]

In years past, the Securities and Exchange Commission used a light touch on its enforcement efforts in municipal securities and pension funds. Not any more. This year the agency dedicated itself, in a very public way, to identifying fraud in the nearly $3 trillion municipal bond market and to cracking down on pay-to-play schemes that […]

State and federal regulators are starting to cast a disapproving eye on contracts with “most-favored nation” clauses, where big buyers of a product or service use their market clout to squeeze sellers, forcing them to raise prices on the buyer’s rivals. The Department of Justice and the Michigan state attorney general filed a lawsuit in […]

A British company director has won an appeal against a Financial Services Authority ruling that he was unfit for his job after a tribunal decided he was guilty only of “carelessness”. The tribunal ruled that Mandeep Panesar, a director of advisory firm Burlington Associates, had made mistakes when he completed an FSA compliance form and […]

Let the comments commence: Compliance professionals finally have the details of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rules to pay whistleblowers who report securities violations. The proposals, detailed in a 181-page release published for comment Nov. 3, implement the Dodd-Frank mandate to set up a program to pay awards of up to 30 percent to […]

U.S. anti-bribery enforcement efforts have come under heightened scrutiny, just as two new laws are expected to launch those efforts into overdrive. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a crime for U.S. companies and their employees to pay bribes to foreign officials to obtain business abroad, ought to be modified to “make clear […]

Regulation Fair Disclosure, the rule aimed at preventing private leaks of sensitive information about public companies, has just startled corporate compliance departments yet again. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent enforcement action against Office Depot for a Reg FD violation (its third within the last 14 months) dinged the company’s CEO and CFO for selectively […]

Accounting firms, law firms, and other outside advisers to corporations are breathing a sigh of relief, thanks to a long-awaited appeals court ruling in the state of New York that third parties can’t be held liable in cases brought on behalf of companies whose senior management engaged in fraud. The Oct. 21 decision by the […]

The new principles of the UK Anti-bribery Act pose a relatively new threat facing companies in the upcoming years. Companies covered by the new act can now face criminal charges if they neglect to put preventative measures in place. The landscape for global anti-bribery is shifting and companies covered by the UK Bribery Act are […]

A federal appeals court has sealed off one loophole in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act regarding clawbacks of executive pay: No, a corporation cannot agree to cover future penalties for CEOs or CFOs who might run afoul of the rules. The case, Cohen v. Viray, is the first to address whether a company can indemnify a CEO […]