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strategy
by leon on February 1, 2007
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? res...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 31, 2007
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 ...
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Accounting
by leon on January 31, 2007
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 com...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 31, 2007
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, Bo...
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Accounting
by leon on January 31, 2007
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 those...
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Ethics
by leon on January 30, 2007
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, acco...
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Ethics
by leon on January 30, 2007
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 i...
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SOX
by leon on January 30, 2007
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 touch...
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executive pay
by leon on January 27, 2007
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 Jobs....
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corporate crime
by leon on January 27, 2007
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 Black'...
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Accounting
by leon on January 27, 2007
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 repor...
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SOX
by leon on January 26, 2007
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 in...
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executive pay
by leon on January 26, 2007
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 conn...
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Accounting
by leon on January 25, 2007
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 Paulso...
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risk
by leon on January 25, 2007
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 near...
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SOX
by leon on January 24, 2007
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 S...
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risk
by leon on January 23, 2007
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 n...
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risk
by leon on January 23, 2007
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 using...
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markets
by leon on January 22, 2007
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 markets...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 22, 2007
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 consi...
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Ethics
by leon on January 20, 2007
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 a...
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Ethics
by leon on January 19, 2007
For more than 30 years, Christoper Pyle has been campaigning for civil liberties.Now he talks about the phone companies colluding with the US government in the surveillance of its citizens in this int...
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events
by Creative Weblogging on January 18, 2007
The debate is on! Or, at least the debate will be on early next month at CMO 2007, a forum hosted by Red Herring which plans to attract 200 CMOs and other experts from the technology and communication...
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Ethics
by leon on January 18, 2007
The headlines about privacy breaches keep coming in.Hewlett-Packard's pretexting scandal is being cited as an example of a new and growing form of anti-privacy skullduggery and privacy is on the a...
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markets
by leon on January 16, 2007
Analysts earn their keep writing forecasts of markets, stocks and other asset classes. The same reports go out but the bigger investors always seem to be the ones that make the money. Why is this the ...
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corporate reputation
by leon on January 16, 2007
Trust in business continues to fall with a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll showing people now have less faith in the corporate world with only 18 per cent of people saying business executives had high or very h...
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SOX
by leon on January 13, 2007
I have written many times that the big problem with Sarbanes-Oxley is that was rushed through without any cost-benefit analysis. The result is a mess and a one-solution fits all approach that the Secu...
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corporate governance
by leon on January 11, 2007
In the past I have raised the question: would Sarbanes-Oxley work for the non-profit sector and for charities?My conclusion: probably not because the needs and constituencies of companies and non-prof...
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Ethics
by leon on January 11, 2007
The Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal, where board members were lying and spying, will go down as one of the big ethical meltdowns of 2006.It also has some profound lessons for corporate governance a...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 10, 2007
What are the statistics for corporate crime? In most jurisdictions around the world, the numbers are usually messy and hard to collate.This what makes the Washington-based Centre for Corporate Policy&...
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Ethics
by leon on January 9, 2007
Saddam Hussein was handed over to a sectarian lynch mob and made to play the lead role in a vile snuff movie. Thousands of Iraqis and Americans are dead and many more are maimed. Billions of dollars h...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 6, 2007
Nothing unusual about greasing palms. But when you travel extensively, you notice there are certain rules and procedures. An etiquette of bribery, all summed up beautifully in this piece in The Econom...
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regulators
by leon on January 6, 2007
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seems to have lost tens of millions of dollars through improper and fraudulent payments, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office....
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executive pay
by leon on January 5, 2007
That's the question raised by BusinessWeek writer Peter Burrows after Apple exonerated Steve Jobs of wrongdoing in the backdating scandal.Certainly, I made the point in this blog entry earlier thi...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 5, 2007
KPMG partners are breathing a sigh of relief with prosecutors officially dropping a criminal conspiracy charge against the accounting firm in an abusive tax-shelter case under a deferred prosecution a...
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corporate crime
by leon on January 4, 2007
Bribery allegations around the globe.Things have just got a lot worse for the German conglomerate Siemens which makes everything from cell phone components to light bulbs and trams. Rocked by investig...
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Compliance
by leon on January 4, 2007
For many business executives, the word "document" is still associated with paper. But with e-discovery now commonplace and new rules coming in for handling electronic documents during litiga...
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litigation
by leon on January 4, 2007
Class-action lawsuits filed over Securities fraud reached an all-time low in 2006, according to the latest figures from Stanford Law School.The data from the Stanford Law School Class Action Clearingh...
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corporate reputation
by leon on January 2, 2007
A profound disconnect between the business, government and media elites and ordinary wage and income earners might explain why trust in business is heading south, according to a new study.It also has ...
Read more of The disconnect: business vs ordinary folk
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executive pay
by leon on January 2, 2007
Apple last week formally exonerated Steve Jobs of any wrongdoing over the options backdating scandal. But the questions linger.Apple's 10K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission did its ...
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executive pay
by leon on January 2, 2007
The generous rewards for chief executive officers reflects "market failure" and can't be justified by arguing that the top job gets highly paid because it has more risks, according to a ...
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regulators
by leon on January 2, 2007
Now for the fallout from the British Government decision to drop the corruption probe into a massive defence deal involving BAE Systems, the world's fourth largest defence contractor, and Saudi Ar...
