Search results for: "accounting controls"
Report: Accounting Lawsuits Getting Pricey
Good news for anyone arguing for more investment in strong internal accounting controls: fresh research shows that companies are paying a lot more money to settle the lawsuits that follow when your weak accounting controls screw things up. So says Cornerstone Research, an outfit that has been tracking the trends in class-action lawsuits for years.…
Read MoreMusings on ‘Aggravating Circumstances’
Today I want to return to the Justice Department’s new policies meant to encourage more self-disclosure of corporate misconduct, even from companies whose violations include aggravating circumstances. Those policies are a welcome step forward, but they create just as many questions for compliance officers as they answer. Let’s first review what these new policies are.…
Read MoreNew Sweeteners for Disclosure, Cooperation
The U.S. Justice Department is amending its Corporate Enforcement Policy, offering more incentives for companies to self-disclose misconduct even if their cases involve aggravating factors that might tempt those companies to keep quiet. Companies in that predicament might still be able to secure a declination to prosecute from the Justice Department if they (1) self-disclose…
Read MoreABB: CCO Certification After All!
Well this is quite the plot twist: the chief compliance officer and the CEO for Swiss industrial giant ABB will indeed need to certify the effectiveness of ABB’s compliance program as part of the company’s FCPA settlement announced last week. That requirement was included in the company’s deferred-prosecution agreement, which the Justice Department did not…
Read MoreSEC Reminders on Identity Theft
The Securities and Exchange Commission has published a review of financial firms’ identity theft programs, in case anyone is looking for helpful hints and tips on how to strengthen your own program. Most of the SEC’s advice, however, boils down to a company sincerely thinking about its risks here. The advice came in the form…
Read MoreAnalyzing ABB’s Third-Time FCPA Case
Swiss industrial giant ABB settled its third FCPA case on Friday, in an enforcement action that generally offers good news for compliance officers but still upends the assumptions we’ve made lately about recidivist offenders and the punishments they’ll face. ABB agreed to pay $460 million in civil and criminal penalties and accepted a three-year deferred…
Read More‘Reasonable Design’ and CCO Certifications
Today I want to revisit the Justice Department’s plans to have chief compliance officers certify the effectiveness of their compliance programs, to unpack a question that’s been bothering me. When the department says it wants certification that your program is reasonably designed to prevent future violations, what does “reasonable” actually mean? Readers of Radical Compliance…
Read MoreComEd Gives a Compliance Update
One of the more colorful compliance stories from 2020 was Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based public utility which paid $200 million that year to settle corruption charges. ComEd also agreed to implement a raft of compliance program improvements — and last Friday, ComEd filed its first ethics and compliance report to talk about its progress so…
Read MoreKT Pays $6.3M to End FCPA Case
Compliance professionals have quite the FCPA case to consider this week, courtesy of the Securities and Exchange Commission hitting Korea’s largest telecommunications carrier with $6.3 million in penalties and disgorgement for all manner of corrupt practices in the 2010s. The company, KT Corp., has a long history of corruption. KT agreed to settle the SEC…
Read MorePaper Raises Red Flag on SPACs Governance
A new research paper raises disturbing questions about the corporate governance of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), and just in time, too — because another, separate bit of research finds that so many SPACs are hitting Wall Street these days that they are single-handedly propping up the number of quarterly filings to the SEC. Let’s…
Read More