Convergence has long been a buzzword among business executives seeking more cost-effective ways to cope with compliance regulations while managing their enterprises’ risks.
As Compliance Week has covered extensively over the past four years, companies have been seeking a unified strategy for risk and compliance. The “holistic” initiative has gotten a big push over the past two years, as the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission released its long-awaited framework on enterprise risk management, and as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board urged companies and their auditors to take a “top-down, risk-based” approach to Sarbanes-Oxley. Additional shareholder and regulatory pressures, including several speeches by former SEC Commissioner Cynthia Glassman that urged companies to do a better job disclosing risks to investors, have added fuel to the ERM flame.
