Facebook will pay a record-breaking $5 billion penalty, and submit to major new privacy restrictions and a modified corporate structure, to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. The whopping […]
GUEST BLOG Internal auditors are always on the lookout for people to emulate and to learn from. Here’s one to study: John C. (Jack) Bogle. Jack Bogle, the late founder of the mutual fund company Vanguard Group, has been an American investor, business magnate, financial innovator, and philanthropist, and is […]
Ever since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002, compliance with the law, known as “SOX,” has been a bit of a thorn in the side of many companies. In earlier years, companies spent millions of dollars and hundreds of employee-hours each to ensure the sophisticated controls over financial reporting that […]
In the post–Sarbanes-Oxley world, internal auditors have increasingly assumed a larger role in corporate governance. For example, Deloitte notes that “if not for the internal audit profession, the business landscape would likely be littered with significantly more disclosures of material weaknesses and revelations of noncompliance with the [Sarbanes-Oxley] Act” (“Optimizing […]
Shares of telecom equipment maker Nokia dropped more than 8 percent last Friday after the company revealed that it is investigating potential compliance problems at its Alcatel-Lucent unit, which it acquired in 2016. The Finnish company disclosed the investigation into certain transactions of the unit in its annual report, which […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has settled charges against four public companies for failing to maintain internal control over financial reporting (ICFR) for several annual reporting periods. Two of the charged companies also failed to complete the required evaluation of the effectiveness of ICFR for two consecutive annual reporting periods. […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission pursued an increased number of enforcement actions in fiscal year 2018 and fined companies and individuals nearly $4 billion in the same period. The SEC said in its annual report that total enforcement actions totaled 821, up 9 percent from 754 in fiscal 2017. Meanwhile, […]
Internal auditors, compliance officers, and other “lines of defense” professionals are in unique positions to spot fraud and wrongdoing at the companies where they work. In most cases it is enough to report the problems to senior management or to the board of directors in situations where senior executives may […]
(Photo: Audit Report by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator) The Center for Audit Quality has issued some much-needed guidance on critical audit matters (CAMs), a new reporting requirement that external auditors will need to start including in their audit reports as early as next year. While the new requirements […]
Dow Chemical has agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle charges that it failed to properly disclose around $3 million in perks for former CEO Andrew Liveris in its proxy statements. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Dow applied an incorrect standard in deciding not to disclose perks including personal […]
