Posts Tagged ‘ICFR’
SEC Hits Firms on Internal Control
The Securities and Exchange Commission dinged four companies on Wednesday for poor internal control over financial reporting — a clear warning to companies that simply disclosing a material weakness in ICFR is not sufficient to fulfill a company’s compliance duties. Executives actually have to fix the problem, and not take too long to do so.…
Read MoreFood Company Cooks the Books
The SEC settled charges with an organic foods company on Tuesday over internal control failures that led to several years of revenue manipulation, in a case with multiple lessons for the internal control community. We don’t see an internal controls case this large come along every day, so let’s digest. First, the background. The accused…
Read MoreSEC on Current Accounting Issues
Spring is here, and that means one thing for financial reporting: the annual financial reporting conference at Baruch College in New York, where SEC chief accountant Wes Bricker shows up and tells us what issues are on his team’s mind as they read all your SEC filings. This year was no exception. The conference happened…
Read MoreComScore Promises Compliance Reform
Compliance officers looking for a new adventure may want to keep one eye on comScore. The accountingly challenged data analytics company just settled long-running shareholder litigation with promises to beef up its compliance operations. Based in Virginia, comScore measures audience engagement for websites, TV, and other media. Its internal control over financial reporting, however, has…
Read MorePodcast: New COSO Chairman Sobel
Internal control and risk management enthusiasts, listen up: we have a new podcast with incoming COSO chairman Paul Sobel, who talked about his desire for COSO to publish more guidance to help companies understand how to put its internal control and risk management frameworks to good, practical use. As always, you can listen to the…
Read MoreSOX Compliance: Do Better Than a ‘C’ Grade
So there we all were on Monday, several hundred of us, warming up for Workiva’s 2017 Wdesk user conference by attending the SOX & Internal Controls Professionals Group Summit to talk all things internal control. On stage was Jeremy Sucharski, GRC, SOX, and internal audit partner at Armanino. He was sharing thoughts on good and bad…
Read MoreTale of Sound & Fury: The 404(b) Debate
We’re going to argue a lot in coming months about whether to exempt many more companies from compliance with Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Personally, I’m torn between those people who believe 404(b) compliance is crucial to good governance; and those who say expanding the exemption will allow more companies to go public. I…
Read MoreLessons Galore in New SEC Internal Control Case
The SEC fined defense contractor L-3 Technologies $1.6 million this week for poor accounting controls. The penalty might be small money, but we don’t often see a “pure” books-and-records enforcement action, so compliance officers would do well to examine the lessons learned here. The failures happened as part of a contract L-3 had with the…
Read MoreBest Practices in SOX Certifications
Some shameless self-promotion today: I have a guest post on Workiva’s blog about financial reporting and SOX compliance, exploring a few best practices in how companies can design and operate certification programs for SOX controls. Getting control owners to certify the effectiveness of those controls is not a new idea, I know. (I first wrote…
Read MoreGovt Agencies Embark on ERM Adventure
An experiment is about to begin in the government sector: federal agencies are going to try embedding enterprise risk management into their operations. risk and internal control professionals in the private sector might want to watch this effort and see how it goes. Final word on the ERM initiative came down last week, when the…
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