Posts Tagged ‘internal control’
Entergy Pays $12M on Poor Controls
Pull up a chair, SOX compliance professionals! Utilities giant Entergy Corp. just settled an accounting controls case with the Securities and Exchange Commission that offers several lessons about oversight of accounting processes and the failure to address weaknesses in a timely manner. The settlement was announced last Friday. Entergy is paying $12 million to settle…
Read MoreBetting/Bitcoin Biz Settles FCPA Charges
Federal prosecutors have sanctioned a one-time Chinese online lottery business turned bitcoin mining operation for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where senior executives bribed Japanese lawmakers in the late 2010s to win permissions to open a casino there — and good lord, writing that sentence feels like hitting some sort of corruption risk…
Read MoreLast Week’s Cybersecurity Disasters
There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. Last week was definitely one of those latter periods for CISOs, internal auditors, compliance officers, and anyone else charged with worrying about cybersecurity. Just consider what happened last week: On Tuesday, UnitedHealth reported spending nearly $1 billion on recovery costs from a ransomware attack…
Read MoreArchives, 2017: Mittens and Manual Controls
Radical Compliance is taking an off-the-grid vacation for the next 10 days, so we are reprinting some of readers’ favorite posts from the archives. The following ran in November 2017. Here at the Radical Compliance home office, every morning my job is to rouse my toddler son from bed, make him breakfast, and take him…
Read MoreNotes on Effective Internal Controls
Last week I had the chance to moderate a webinar on an issue eternally flummoxing to compliance officers: building effective systems of internal control. We had great speakers who gave great advice, so as usual I took lots of notes to pass along to the rest of you here. Let’s first appreciate why internal controls…
Read MoreLessons From Citigroup’s Fat Finger
This week Citigroup agreed to pay $78 million to settle charges that its internal controls failed to catch a so-called “fat finger error” in 2022, when a Citigroup trader placed a gigantic sell order by mistake and sent European stock markets plunging. Compliance officers should pull up a chair; we have several lessons to learn…
Read MoreGuidance on Root Cause Analysis
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has published fresh guidance on how to perform a root cause analysis, for anyone out there who wants to understand the root of your problems. The guidance, published Tuesday, is geared toward audit firms rather than corporate businesses, so not all the advice in its nine pages will be…
Read MoreInternal Controls Come for Trump
At long last, we have an internal controls and compliance angle on Donald Trump’s courtroom drama! When Trump was ordered last week to pay $355 million in damages for his civil fraud trial in New York, the judge in the case also ordered the Trump Organization to hire a director of financial compliance. This person,…
Read MoreAnother Lesson on Accounting Controls
Royal Bank of Canada has settled charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission over poor accounting controls for software development, which might sound super nerdy — because it is, really — but the case also lets us ponder yet again the importance of a strong control environment. The SEC announced the case late last week.…
Read MoreIs AI Leaving Your Internal Controls Behind?
So everyone is freaking about artificial intelligence and its rapid deployment throughout the corporate enterprise. That brings up an important question: are companies updating their internal controls fast enough to keep pace with that AI adoption? This is on my mind because the other week Deloitte released the results of a survey that suggests no,…
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