All Internal Controls articles – Page 6
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Blog
SEC Expects Year-End Disclosures on Revenue Rule Plans
Image: SEC Chief Accountant Jim Schnurr has advised audit committees to get involved in overseeing implementation of the new revenue standard, which takes effect in 2018. Schnurr said that should include disclosures about how the standard will affect financial statements. “We expect the level of these disclosures to increase and ...
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Article
As Companies Reorganize Themselves, Compliance Concerns Demand Consideration
Some of the nation’s best-known companies are redefining themselves. Google created a new holding company to spin off its more exotic interests into separate companies; Alcoa is planning to divide into two public companies; Dell and data storage giant EMC are planning to merge. When companies restructure, no matter the ...
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Article
Aligning the Organization for Principled Performance
Management must align objectives to the organizations’s business environment and internal culture, but what does alignment really mean? In this latest installment of the GRC Illustrated Series, brought to you by Compliance Week and OCEG, experts discuss alignment in the context of GRC and keeping the company on the right ...
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Article
SEC Accounting Enforcement: Bigger and Badder
Image: Perhaps some public companies haven’t yet taken to heart the (numerous) signals from regulators to button up their internal controls. A recent legal analysis of accounting-related enforcement actions from the SEC should do the trick. Sanctions are happening more frequently, and penalties are bigger. “The SEC is effectively ...
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Blog
Culture Ate Strategy at Toshiba
Management guru Peter Drucker famously said culture eats strategy for breakfast. This time around, we examine Toshiba’s $1.2 billion financial fraud to see how true that saying is. Inside, columnist Richard Steinberg looks at the cultural patterns of Japan generally and Toshiba specifically that led to this meltdown, which reinforce ...
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Article
ISO 20022: Tepid U.S. Embrace for New Financial Standard
Image: The push to adopt a new ISO standard for financial transactions is gaining momentum on a global scale—even as the United States continues to weigh the business case for it. “It’s important because it is seen as the standard that all new financial transactions will move to over time,” ...
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Blog
PCAOB to Air Corporate Angst Over Internal Control Audits
Image: The PCAOB will convene its Investor Advisory Group in September to explore criticisms that the regulatory approach around internal controls is out of step with risk. Specifically, the group will address a recent letter from Tom Quaadman, vice president of the Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness at the Chamber ...
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Blog
Internal Control Audits Improving, to a Point
Image: Audits of internal control over financial reporting are starting to improve, but it’s still too early to say if audit practice has turned the corner as fully as regulators want, according to PCAOB Member Jeanette Franzel. Franzel said internal control over financial reporting continues to be the most frequent ...
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Article
Auditing Anti-Corruption Efforts: Best Practices Take Shape
Image: More anti-corruption efforts by compliance departments means more auditing of those programs by internal audit, and a vanguard of businesses (many of them, admittedly, stung by misconduct violations in the past) are pioneering better auditing techniques on that point. Tom O’Reilly, director of internal audit at Analog Devices, says ...
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Article
Hertz Restatement Drives Home Top-Level Control Issues
Image: Car rental kingpin Hertz Corp. is nearly finished with its sweeping restatement of several years’ worth of financial statements, and it’s giving compliance and audit executives plenty of cautionary tales to read. Its latest annual report outlines—in frank detail—more than a dozen failures, most of them in senior leadership. ...
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Blog
Breaking Risk Management Down to Manageable Size
Effective risk management may seem daunting, and many companies say they fell victim to misconduct because nobody ever considered whatever risk event came to pass. The reality, Compliance Week columnist Rick Steinberg writes, is that many risks have happened before, and companies can anticipate them. Inside, he reviews the building ...
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Article
More Banks Tying Pay to Corporate Values
More financial institutions, facing pressure from regulators and investors, are starting to tie compensation practices to ethical behavior and appropriate risk-taking—although progress has been slow. “A consistent leadership culture is necessary in which corporate values, business strategy, and formal incentives support each other,” said Jürgen Fitschen, co-chair of the group ...
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Article
Fighting Complexity With Integrated Compliance Efforts
More than ever before, managing compliance risk now requires a framework that unifies decentralized compliance activities. The goal: to streamline monitoring, testing, and reporting. That may sound difficult in theory—and, well, it’s difficult in practice too. Inside we have tales from Coca-Cola and Kimberly-Clark on how they try to integrate ...
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Article
COSO Implementation Gets Gritty
Whether you adopted the new COSO framework for internal control last year or stalled into 2015, a chorus of voices say now is the time for implementation (or even polishing last year’s implementation) once and for all. “This year is the time to adopt,” says KPMG partner David Middendorf. Inside, ...
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Blog
Second Citigroup Compliance Update Posted
Ten months after Citigroup’s $7 billion settlement with the government to resolve investigations into the sale of sub-prime mortgages, the bank has published its second compliance progress report, which provides an update on consumer relief credit submitted for the monitor’s assessment; a description of outreach events Citi has conducted; and ...
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Blog
Managing FCPA Audits on a Global Scale
Enforcing anti-corruption policies among employees and third parties is one of the foremost concerns for compliance departments, but developing a robust process to assess and uncover bribery risks is not easy. At Compliance Week 2015, legal and audit executives with oil services giant Baker Hughes shared how they audit parties ...
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Article
Compliance Trends in 2015: More Authority, More IT Uncertainty
Good news for compliance officers in existential crisis: A majority of CCOs are now part of the senior management teams at their businesses, and they have more authority than ever before. Those are two among many findings of the 2015 Compliance Trends Report, the annual survey of compliance leaders conducted ...
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Article
Parsing the Data on Financial Restatements
Image: The data behind financial restatements tell a fairly positive tale for 2014, with improvements in financial reporting across many variables (unless you’re an accelerated filer, where restatements edged up from the prior year). Inside we have a close look at which companies restated for what reasons, and whether improvement ...
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Blog
Study: Disclosing Control Weaknesses Does You Few Favors
Companies that disclose control problems ahead of restatements get no pat on the back or other indicators of gratitude from investors, according to a recent academic study. On the contrary, they are more likely to face harsher consequences for their transparency than companies that provide no advance warning. More inside.
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Article
Running in Place or Winning the New Race?
Image: Our GRC Illustrated series returns this week, looking at how compliance programs can keep pace with new ways of communicating within business and with the new employees who use them. That will mean addressing multiple audiences through multiple channels, and it will pose new challenges for policy management, training, ...