Much has been said about the impact the new ethics and lobbying rules will have on Congress.But what sort of impact would it have on business? How will it change their interactions with lawmakers?...

Corporate Germany was on trial last week.First, a former Volkswagen executive, Peter Hartz, was convicted of a bribery and prostitution probe into the company. The full story from Bloomberg.Meanwhile...

High turnover of chief financial officer turnover is now a fact of corporate life. But a growing number are now jumping ship, according to Reuters.According to the news report, 2300 CFOs of public...

Interesting paper from Paul Povel, Rajdeep Singh and Andrew Winton from the University of minnesota on the cyclical nature of fraud and the implications for public policy and legislation.The paper,...

More evidence that Sarbanes-Oxley is now a gold mine for accountants.Research from Robert Half International shows that the accounting jobs with the most growth potential for 2007 continue to be...

For years, Exxon Mobil condemned climate change campaigners. The oil giant went so far as to fund researchers and think tanks to spread the message that global warming was just a load of hot air,...

Can a company's lawyer develop an ethical corporate culture? Lynn D. Lieber makes that case The Corporate Counselor published on the Law.com site.Basically, the line is that corporate counsel is...

James Surowiecki has been a long-time defender of corporate regulation. Not surprisingly, he now condemns the doomsayers who say Sarbanes-0xley is destroying the American markets.They are out of...

The US Attorney's office in San Francisco is in upheaval with the departure of key players into the backdating investigations, including the one involving Apple chief executive officer Steve...

A few weeks ago, I did a blog entry mentioning that Conrad Black was considering hiring jury consultants to try and make the former media mogul come across as a regular sort of guy.Now with...

Worrying news or a step forward?The audit watchdog has identified serious deficiencies in the way auditors check the books of their clients for fraud. A Public Company Accounting Oversight Board...

Despite a McKinsey report warning that New York faces a dire future as a financial centre if Sarbanes-Oxley isn't fixed, and despite the misgivings about SOX from Hank Paulson's crew in the...

Some interesting questions come out of America's epidemic of stock options backdating scandals. Like how did the practice begin? And why did it spread so quickly?One reason would be the close...

The ghost of Andersen lingers.Back towards the end of last year, I did a blog entry on a push in Europe to provide auditors with the protection of liability caps.Then the interim report of Hank...

The world's CEOs are in an upbeat mood as they meet in Davos with a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, as reported here , finding they are overwhelmingly optimistic about growth, their confidence...

The push to wind back Sarbanes-Oxley continues with US Senator Charles Schumer and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg releasing a 134-page report urging legal and regulatory reforms to make the United...

When it's released next week, an authoritative global scientific report will reveal the "smoking gun" of climate change and warn us that things are going to get worse, according to the...

Gangs spreading malicious Trojan horse software are getting smarter, and quicker. In the first big attack of 2007, they tried tricking users into executing files containing the malicious code by...

I have talked about the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley forcing companies to delist themselves and go dark. The disturbing part about that trend is that it undermines one of the great strengths of the...

With the latest reports coming in of Sudanese planes bombing Darfur in the four year civil war which has killed 200,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless, and European Union foreign ministers...

How effective a deterrent is the threat of a jail sentence or heavy fine? Why do managers keep stepping over the line when it come to ethical behavior? And why do the same things keep happening over...