Here's a reason why annual reports are hard to read - the directors and managers might be trying to hide something.Those are the findings of a University of Michigan study.......

Think before you hit that "send" key.With emails now a compliance minefield, the big corporations in the US and Britain are now bringing in snoops to monitor and vet emails at the...

Plenty of debate since the USA Today report earlier this month that the national security Agency was using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to collect phone call records of tens of...

The irony is just too much. The Government Accountability Office has found that material weaknesses in the Securities and Exchange Commission's internal controls identified in an audit of the...

Just couldn't go past this funny story.Here's a lesson for businesses struggling to meet the demands of data protection under Sarbanes-Oxley. Be careful how you encrypt the stuff that needs...

Employee monitoring is a fact. It's a trend happening the world over. Check this report from Japan, for instance, where more companies are putting in tracking software that, among other things,...

Last month, I blogged on the question of whether quarterly earnings forecasts were about transparency or whether they were just a fool's game that just encouraged appalling short-term-ism.Another...

Merrill Lynch has been pinged $2.5 million for failing to promptly provide the Securities and Exchange Commission with e-mail messages that the regulators had been chasing for 16 months. According to...

Welcome to Dumbsville.First, a red-faced H&R Block, which helps millions of people do their taxes, comes out with the embarrassing news that it messed up its own tax bill and that it owes another...

Last year, US Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Thomas J. Donohue gave an address calling on all publicly traded companies to stop offering quarterly earnings guidance, saying these...

IBM's Global Security Intelligence has warned that there will be a big shift in cybercrime this year. Along with mobile devices, instant messaging from botnets, blogging-led security leaks,...

By Viagra!! With Yahoo and AOL planning a service that will charge businesses to send email , claiming the fee would help reduce fraudulent and spam email, Charles Kraeuter of Forbes has a...

Designing good systems for internal controls under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 has been compared to "finding a needle in a stack of needles".Hugh Taylor, vice president of marketing at SOA...

Expect the compliance treadmill is about to slow down? Think again. '06 and '07 are set to be big years for monitoring, record keeping and re-engineering of processes across businesses....

First the good news. It's a great time to be an accountant or an IT specialist. Florida-based Kforce Professional Staffing has released Salary & Employment Guides showing that there will be a...

After years of struggling with Sarbanes-Oxley and other bits and pieces of regulation, CSOs say compliance is about to get worse. They predict regulation will be messier and complicated in 2006. The...

The latest figures from AMR Research show that companies will spend $6 billion on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in 2006. That's pretty pretty much in line with what was spent last year. Still, nobody...

The costs of SOX compliance. Some businesses still say they are burning money. In the beginning, there was talk of it being an initial one-off cost, but the latest from AMR Research says compliance...

One of the most striking features in corporate scandals in recent years is the role of email. When Morgan Stanley was ordered earlier this year to pay $1.45 billion to billionaire financier Ronald...