The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) publishes the Directorship 100. They surveyed 15,000 public company directors and executives to form the final 100 honorees. I was interested to see how they broke them into groups: Regulators and Rule Makers Directors CEOs Governance Policy Makers Attorneys Investors Auditors Recruiters Compensators D&O Insurers, Governance Advisors Corporate … Read more »
Social Networking Malware as Affinity Fraud
Panda Security released its first annual Social Media Risk Index for small- and medium-sized businesses. They surveyed 315 US SMBs with up to 1,000 employees during the month of July. 33 percent of these companies had experienced a malware or virus infection from social networks 23 percent citing employee privacy violations resulting in the loss … Read more »
The SEC’s Busy Rule-Making Agenda
In many instances, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act merely set a framework for financial reform and left much of the heavy lifting to the financial regulatory agencies. The SEC published their agenda for the implementation of Dodd-Frank. It is a long list. Compliance leaders are going to very busy keeping track … Read more »
Corruption Currents: The Wall Street Journal’s New Corruption Blog
“Corruption Currents, the Wall Street Journal’s corruption blog, will dig into the ever-present and ever-changing world of corporate corruption. It will be a source of news, analysis and commentary for those who earn a living by finding corruption or by avoiding it.” Apparently corruption has become such a big topic that the Wall Street Journal … Read more »
Adequate Procedures to Prevent Bribery in the UK
On 14 September 2010, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice issued its Consultation Paper on what might be “adequate procedures” prevent bribery. Under section 9 of the Bribery Act, the only defense against criminal liability for a commercial organization which has “failed to prevent bribery” is that the organization had adequate procedures” to prevent bribery. … Read more »
SEC Proposal on Short-Term Borrowing Disclosure by Public Companies
The Securities and Exchange Commission voted to propose measures that would require public companies to disclose additional information to investors about their short-term borrowing arrangements. The proposals would require “a registrant to provide, in a separately captioned subsection of Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, a comprehensive explanation of its … Read more »
Compliance Bits and Pieces for September 17
Here are some recent compliance-related stories that I found interesting: Fighting to Protect Consumers by Elizabeth Warren in the Huffington Post The president asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has also … Read more »
Integrity, Morality, and Ethics
I always struggle with definitions of ethics and morality. Michael Jensen, of Harvard Business School throws integrity into the mix of terms. Here are his definitions: Integrity: A state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition. Ethics: In a given group, ethics is the agreed upon standards of what is … Read more »
Europe’s Approach to Derivatives Regulation
With this summer’s passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it’s Europe’s turn to address financial regulation. This morning, the European Commission released its Proposal for Regulation on OTC Derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories. The proposal seems to look a lot like the Dodd-Frank’s approach by creating a central trade … Read more »
The New Face of Evil?
His crime was simple: collect money from investors, fake the returns, pocket the money, and repeat. His crime was the biggest: $20 billion in cash plus $45 billion of fake returns. Should Bernie Madoff be the new name for evil? Christine Hurt of University of Illinois College of Law contrasts Madoff with the original Ponzi … Read more »