Excellent, brief Alert from the law firm Duane Morris warns that failure to understand the technological landscape at the onset of litigation “may result in the loss or alteration of important evidence, impairing the ability to prosecute or defend against claims.”
Technology
Posted inTechnology
How A $47B Giant Learned To Love XBRL
If the Securities and Exchange Commission seeks a poster child for the positive effect XBRL technology can have on a company’s financial reporting system, John Stantial stands ready to volunteer United Technologies Corp. Stantial, UTC’s director of financial reporting, has completed 10 regulatory filings using XBRL since first implementing the system under the SEC’s voluntary […]
Posted inTechnology
Retailers Feel Pressure For PCI Compliance
It’s amazing what the carrot of $20 million in incentives—or the stick of millions in potential fines—can do for an IT-security standard. On Dec. 12, 2005, Visa USA announced that it would either handsomely reward or seriously punish scores of major banks and card processors, depending on how well they prodded 1,200 U.S. retailers to […]
Posted inData Privacy
Taking A Holistic View Of Risk And Privacy
Companies looking to purchase technology to assist in compliance efforts increasingly are turning to systems that allow them to implement controls for both governance and privacy regulations. “Customers are more mature,” says Ron Ben-Natan, chief technology officer of Guardium, a database monitoring and security company. Customers know not to treat each regulation with standalone initiatives, […]
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Another Step Forward On XBRL’s Long Road
The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally pulled back the curtain on how it wants investors and Corporate America to use XBRL, unveiling a glittering new way to read financial statements filed in the interactive data language. Anyone can now visit the SEC’s Web site and use a prototype application known as an XBRL reader, […]
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Case Study: How To Adopt XBRL Filings
When the executives at Old Mutual Capital, a mutual fund based in Denver, decided to test the interactive-data waters this year, they didn’t know what to expect. They did know the Securities and Exchange Commission had been pushing companies to start filing their periodic reports in XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language that supposedly will […]
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GAAP For IT? Conflicting Standards Abound
If compliance is from Mars, then IT security is from Venus. Take Sarbanes-Oxley compliance as an example. The law makes clear that a corporation’s financial information shall be secure, but it says nothing about exactly how a company is supposed to achieve security in the IT realm. At the other, far more verbose end of […]
Posted inData Privacy
Still A Disconnect Between Compliance, IT
It’s the disappointing truth about much of Corporate America’s IT efforts: Despite years of overhauls, tweaks, and projects, many companies still remain unprepared for lawsuits, audits, or regulatory probes because they lack the IT infrastructure to manage their data effectively and apply it to compliance efforts. So say two recent studies trying to gauge the […]
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Electronic Delivery, Cost Savings For Public Companies Remains On The SEC Backburner
The folks over at the Securities and Exchange Commission have been pretty busy this year. So far in 2006, they’ve already proposed rules on executive compensation disclosure, mutual fund fees, commodity trading, short selling and more—including the Section 404 extension for non-accelerated filers. And just last month the SEC announced it would propose an amendment […]
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Experts Expect Surge In IT-Controls Automation
While companies that haven’t yet had to comply with Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley await more guidance and expected tweaks to the standards in place for auditors, those that have already bitten the Section 404 bullet have turned their attention to the next phase in compliance, experts say. With three years of 404 compliance under their […]