Technology

Despite rule changes aimed at facilitating online communication between companies and their shareholders, it seems electronic shareholder forums are an idea whose time hasn’t come, just yet. The Securities and Exchange Commission adopted amendments to the federal proxy rules last November to facilitate the use of electronic shareholder forums. So far, however, companies have showed […]

Christian Phillips, chief security officer at payment processing company Regulus and an old hand at running corporate IT departments, knows all too well the challenges of blending IT departments after a merger. In fact, he’s doing it right now. Regulus was acquired in April by publicly traded 3i Infotech for $100 million. Phillips now must […]

As companies await a final Securities and Exchange Commission rule that will force them to use XBRL technology in their financial filings as soon as next year, the SEC has unveiled an XBRL push of its own: scrapping the EDGAR database in favor of a new system to handle “interactive data” filings. The SEC held […]

Editor’s note: The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to publish a rule mandating XBRL technology for financial statements as soon as this fall. To hear how much of a challenge XBRL implementation can be, we caught up with four financial reporting executives at companies that have already been participating in the SEC’s voluntary pilot XBRL […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission can mandate use of XBRL technology for financial reporting all it wants. Ultimately, however, the investing public must take one key action to make companies’ investments in XBRL worth all that time and money. They must trust that XBRL-tagged numbers work. That’s where validation—the art of confirming that, yes, all […]

Corporate America is generally voicing support for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule to mandate that corporations file financial statements using XBRL technology, although a few gripes remain about the timetable for adoption and about the difficulty of handling footnotes. The comment period for the rule proposal closed Aug. 1. All signs indicate the […]

Another flurry of IT security rules to protect consumers’ credit card data went into effect this month—not that they will be much help to bewildered and frustrated retailers across the country. As of July 1, PCI Industry Data Standard 6.6 gave merchants a framework to ensure that point-of-sale information uploaded into Web-based applications is protected […]

Explaining IT risk to senior executives and board directors in a meaningful way has always been difficult for computer folks. Now two major independent efforts to bridge the language gap have begun, with a third to follow later this year. Both the Open Group—long a major force in software standardization—and the International Organization for Standardization […]

A new Compliance Week survey suggests that most of Corporate America is barely aware of XBRL, the financial reporting technology the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to mandate later this fall. The SEC has already published a proposal to mandate XBRL for all companies by 2011, and for Fortune 500 companies as soon as […]