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, […]
Technology
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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 […]
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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 […]
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XBRL Advances; SEC: Heed Comment Letters
The Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to forge ahead with its push for widespread adoption of XBRL, announcing a major overhaul of its database of corporate regulatory filings that will use the interactive computer language as its technological heart. The overhaul comes through three contracts worth a total of $54 million, which the SEC […]
Posted inData Privacy
The Importance Of Auditing IT Projects Well
Changes to a company’s IT infrastructure are a significant source of risk for every business; to protect the corporate crown jewels, robust change-management practices are absolutely critical. The need for a positive “control environment” within IT and a very unforgiving attitude regarding unauthorized IT changes cannot be overstated. In fact, a recent study by the […]
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Who Are You? ID Management Under SOX
Once upon a time, managing identities was a snap. Corporate IT infrastructure consisted of a single, hulking IBM mainframe with a relatively specialized group of back-office users who were either logged on or not. If line employees or managers had computers at all, they were used for word processing and spreadsheets, and people “networked” machines […]