Filed in archive corporate crime
by leon on September 17, 2007
He might well have been according to a though-provoking study from the University of Rochester's James Brickley.The study The Role of CEOs in Large Corporations:Evidence from Ken Lay at Enron can...
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CEOs say attacks on corporate reputation are becoming more frequent, apologies from the boss are losing potency and it takes about 3 and half years to recover when your reputation has been...
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Filed in archive Accounting
by leon on September 15, 2007
In an historically significant move, the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 69 accounting firms and individuals - 37 firms and 32 audit partners - with violating Sarbanes-Oxley by failing...
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Filed in archive corporate crime
by leon on September 14, 2007
Between April 2003 and June 2004, the Federal Reserve shipped $12 billion to help run war-ravaged Iraq. Most of the money came exclusively from assets frozen in US banks dating back to the 1990 Gulf...
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Filed in archive Ethics
by leon on September 14, 2007
Most of us like to think we are ethical.Enron was a bunch of crooks, Andersen colluded with them and Conrad Black and his lackeys were fraudsters. There is no way we are like that.Or are we?If that...
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Filed in archive Compliance
by leon on September 13, 2007
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...
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Filed in archive markets
by leon on September 13, 2007
With forecasts that the US economy will either come perilously close to recession , or actually slip into recession, chief financial officers are increasingly gloomy about the prospects of the...
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Filed in archive risk
by leon on September 12, 2007
Last week, I talked about how business leaders believed they were now working in an increasingly dangerous world with that political violence shaping up as a bigger problem than crime.Now the PRS...
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Rupert Murdoch has to deal with a persistent and effective Australian shareholder activist in Stephen Mayne.News Corp tried unsuccessfully to stop a proposal from Mayne that the company scrap its...
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Filed in archive Accounting
by leon on September 11, 2007
I've talked about how much of a money spinner Sarbanes-Oxley has been for accountants.But they work for it too.New research from Robert Half shows that finance professionals are putting in longer...
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Filed in archive Ethics
by leon on September 11, 2007
How does a company live with whistleblowers? What does it have to do to encourage people to speak when there are issues, but at the same time ensure that it does not throw operations and management...
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Filed in archive Accounting
by leon on September 10, 2007
The fallout from Dell's accounting shell games continue.Now, Dell boss Michael Dell has told a Citigroup technology conference in New York that he had nothing to do with it. "I was not...
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In their books Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton argue that leadership is not all it's cracked up to be. They show how change at the top has...
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Filed in archive corporate crime
by leon on September 08, 2007
Maybe Jeff Skilling has taken some lessons from fellow-fraudster Conrad Black who put up a motion asking for either a retrial or acquittal, claiming the prosecution had not proved its case.Now the...
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Filed in archive risk
by leon on September 07, 2007
This week, I sat down to have a chat with Thomas Homer-Dixon, professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and author of The Upside of Down. In his book, Homer-Dixon argues that the...
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Filed in archive Accounting
by leon on September 07, 2007
For the last two years, I have been talking about how Sarbanes-Oxley has been a licence to print money for the accounting profession.Examples are here and here.And now the latest Rosenberg MAP...
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Filed in archive corporate crime
by leon on September 06, 2007
The Siemens group might have new leadership but the bribery scandal is not going away with reports that that US Securities and Exchange Commission is now putting pressure on the German government to...
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Filed in archive risk
by leon on September 06, 2007
Business leaders believe they are now working in an increasingly dangerous world with political violence shaping up as a growing risk for companies planning to invest in big ventures.An Economist...
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Filed in archive risk
by leon on September 05, 2007
Technology-related risks might rank high on the agenda for boards these days. But new research suggests many British company directors are totally clueless when it comes to understanding IT...
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Filed in archive risk
by leon on September 05, 2007
Have finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's thought-provoking book The Black Swan. All about the futility and danger of making and relying on forecasts.Basically, Taleb argues that we are...
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Filed in archive Compliance
by leon on September 04, 2007
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...
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