The rich are different. Unlike the rest of the population, big US corporations and foreign owned corporations are getting out of paying tax, according to the latest Government Accountability Office...

Last month, I did a blog entry looking at how accountants were not ready for Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) which is supposed to make it easier for investors to analyze financial data....

Compliance officers are cashing in on the ever-growing pile of laws and regulations confronting companies around the world. Some are now earning well into the seven figures, reports Michael Grebb at...

Is fair disclosure the same as full disclosure?It's an important question in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis where investors clearly were not given sufficient information. Louis Thompson...

Plenty has been said about the growth of compliance costs. Now we have further evidence that compliance spending is rising faster than net income for financial institutions, according to the latest...

Société Générale has posted a massive fourth-quarter loss after maverick trader Jérôme Kerviel blew $7.2 billion in unauthorized trades but the bank seems to doing its best not to shoulder any...

Had a chat this week with Brett Curran, vice president of GRC and privacy practices at Axentis. He was in Texas, I was in Melbourne, Australia. But it was a great session. We talked about all the...

At the beginning of this month, I did a blog entry on how foreign companies are now getting caught out in the increase in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions brought by the Department...

Despite Sarbanes-Oxley and the UK Combined Code, most corporate boards remain clueless about setting up the proper governance of their information technology systems.A survey, reported here, has...

Last year, former Morgan Stanley chairman Sir David Walker issued a report that put greater onus on private equity funds in Britain to provide more details of the financial performance of companies...

Earlier this year, I did an entry looking at how the virtual world of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games needs regulation. Obviously police are waking up to this with revelations about...

The Government Accountability Office has once more canned the Internal Revenue Service for its sloppy internal controls, legacy systems and dodgy Information Security.In its report, the GAO said the...

Not that long ago, I did a blog entry looking at a suggestion from Bearing Point's information technology global solutions leader Rob Hillard suggesting that companies should replace one-on-one...

A few years ago, carbon trading was seen as a niche business. Not any more. There is now a growing recognition that it is set to become the world's biggest commodity market. Potentially, it could...

With a fascinating email trail at the heart of an industrial espionage case involving McLaren and Ferrari and with Morgan Stanley's email woes last year, it's time to ask whether companies...

Last month I presented an interview with AXS-One chairman and CEO Bill Lyons on the problems companies had with email compliance.Now we are told of the top five email compliance mistakes.The mistakes...

Retention of electronic records is a hot issue for business and it has proven itself to be a big compliance headache. I have blogged on that issue here, here and here.AXS-One is a global records...

No secret that compliance spending has been heading north since Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II. But is it doing any good?Not according to a survey published in Steve Brown's Network Observations...

Company reports might be misleading investors by distorting their true market value, according to a new study.The study, from London's Cass Business School, found that conventional measures...

In the past, I have looked at how the big corporations in the US and Britain have brought in snoops to check emails in the workplace.Now it seems they've been beaten to the punch.One in three IT...