Trump Grabs at Rulemaking

deregulation

The Trump Administration launched a new plan Thursday to bring federal rulemaking under more direct White House control, where all proposed rules — including those from independent agencies such as the SEC, which historically have had more rulemaking freedom — will be subject to review from White House officials. The Office of Management and Budget…

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Regulatory Rollback, Kinda Sorta

deregulation

Fresh news on the regulatory compliance front: banking regulators published a bulletin on Tuesday clarifying the role of the supervisory guidance they issue, to remind everyone that violating points raised in guidance documents is not an automatic compliance failure unto itself. This is in step with the Trump Administration’s larger effort to defang “sub-regulatory guidance”…

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The Costs and Benefits of Regulation

deregulation

As Congress prepares to roll back regulation of the financial sector this week and the SEC continues its tap dance toward doing the same for securities regulation, compliance theorists might want to read two recent reports about measuring the costs and benefits of regulation. First is a draft report published Feb. 23 by the Office…

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Misplaced Regulatory Moves, Up Close

deregulation

Like manna from heaven, every time you write about some grand plan from government, fate sends an example of how harebrained bureaucracy can be in practice. And so today we have an example of missing the point on deregulation, which some bureaucrat at the Federal Communications Commission clearly did. According to an item on the…

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Regulatory Czar Eyes Agency Guidance

regulatory

The Trump Administration’s top regulatory review officer is outlining ambitious plans for more deregulation in 2018 — including efforts to sweep independent federal agencies into her purview and to crack down on the “sub-regulatory” guidance that corporate compliance professionals consume all the time. Neomi Rao, head of the Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)…

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Whither the Future of XBRL?

xbrl

Don’t look now, but disagreement may be brewing among Republicans in Washington over the future of XBRL, the data-tagging technology that companies use when submitting financial statements to the SEC. On one side are Republicans in the House Financial Services Committee, who want to exempt a vast number of smaller public companies from filing financial…

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Lessons in SEC’s Latest Accounting Case

fraud

On Monday the SEC hit a Korean microchip manufacturer, MagnaChip Semiconductor, with a $3 million fine for accounting fraud—an extensive scheme to falsify revenue for several years, that wiped out more than two-thirds of the company’s value to investors. We have two lessons to learn here. First, even amid all the anti-regulatory fervor of the…

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Drone Industry Pans Trump Regulatory Plan

drone

Many thanks to the unmanned drone industry, which last week said the obvious about Donald Trump’s idea for government agencies to repeal two existing regulations for every new rule they want to adopt: it’s a simplistic notion that could actually harm new industries more than it helps them. The Commercial Drone Alliance sent a letter to…

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