Posts Tagged ‘internal control’
New Guidance on Critical Audit Matters
Accounting regulators have published new guidance for audit firms about how to disclose Critical Audit Matters they find with corporate clients. Internal audit and compliance managers might want to give the document a read too, since it serves as a quasi-blueprint of how to anticipate delicate subjects in internal control and corporate accounting. CAMs are…
Read MoreSEC Preps SOX 404(b) Rollback
The Securities and Exchange Commission will move forward next week with long awaited, but totally not surprising, plans to raise the threshold for accelerated filer status — a move that will pave the way for more companies to avoid outside audits of their internal control over financial reporting. The SEC posted a notice that it…
Read MoreOh, Joy: A New Cyber Risk
An interesting article from the New York Times recently, noting that some insurance firms are declining to cover damages from cybersecurity breaches — under the logic that those breaches were acts of war by foreign governments, rather than criminal acts by individuals; and therefore not covered by a corporation’s cyber insurance policies. The article cites…
Read MoreOh, Gee: Fraud Case Involving Estimates
We have a fresh case of accounting fraud to mull this week, this time with a Wisconsin trucking firm where three senior executives cooked the books for years and eventually drove $245 million of shareholder value over the cliff. Yet again, poor internal control over management estimates and use of spreadsheets played a starring role…
Read MoreBankrate Pays $28.5M in Fraud Case
Yes, yes, the compliance community is buzzing today about the $850 million FCPA settlement announced Wednesday evening between U.S. authorities and Russian mobile phone company MTS. We’ll get to MTS another day. The Justice Department also settled a securities and accounting fraud case yesterday with the owners of personal finance website Bankrate.com, and that one…
Read MoreCOSO Guidance for Healthcare Firms
Fresh news on the guidance front: COSO has released a new guide to help healthcare organizations implement its internal control framework widely used by public companies. Nonprofit hospitals and related healthcare firms don’t need to use the COSO internal control framework per se, but they do have plenty of internal issues related to system access…
Read MoreSEC 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 MoreOf Blown Calls and Internal Control
Effective internal control can be a difficult subject to understand, so ethics and compliance officers who hail from the legal world should be delighted right now. A great example of internal control issues gone awry fell into our laps this week from the world of sports. I speak, of course, of the blown referee call…
Read MoreDeloitte Inspection Report Released
The PCAOB has released its latest inspection report for Deloitte, finding that 20 percent of the audits examined were flawed enough to question whether auditors had reached defensible conclusions. This is the first inspection report we’ve seen this year for a Big 4 firm, and also the first one issued since new leadership took over…
Read MoreHertz, Estimates, and Internal Controls
Who says a government shutdown means no news for internal control and compliance? On New Year’s Eve the Securities and Exchange Commission served up another juicy enforcement action, hitting Hertz Corp. with a $16 million penalty for sloppy accounting practices that led to a financial restatement in 2015. The case is worth a look because…
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