Companies might be taking their audit committees more seriously but there's still a long way to go, according to a new study.The number of accountants sitting on audit committees has more than...

New York governor-elect Eliot Spitzer has attacked members of the Bush administration and business lobbyists for trying to roll back Sarbanes-Oxley.In an interview with the Financial Times, Spitzer...

The Hong Kong apparel industry has been given the thumbs down for its lack of accountability on labor standards and compliance.A report prepared by Oxfam Hong Kong, Transparency Report: How Hong Kong...

With identify fraud increasing at an alarming rate, it's worth checking out this timely piece Six ways to avoid identity theft.The piece is based largely on the Javelin Strategy and Research 2006...

Australia's wheat trade is under the microscope and AWB's export monopoly is about to end following damning findings from the Cole inquiry into bribes paid to the Saddam Hussein regime using...

The private equity frenzy is starting to feel like the dot com bubble. Whenever I hear talk of new business paradigms, it's a case of deja vu. And the risks are getting bigger.One of the...

With Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's Committee on Capital Markets Regulation due to report its findings on Sarbanes-Oxley this week, questions are now being raised whether a SOX rollback is a...

Interesting connections coming out of the announcement by Houston-based HCC Insurance Holdings that it had been backdating stock option grants from 1995.The President's youngest brother Marvin...

Companies and governments are asking us to trust them when we hand over confidential information about ourselves.So it's hardly reassuring when we have a study conducted by Unisys in partnership...

Good help is hard to find these days, particularly at the sharp edge of the business world where Zegna suits, seven figure base salaries and jammy incentives are all the go.Which makes the fuss...

Yes, it's that time of year to nominate the biggest turkeys since last November.This year's list is extensive. There's no shortage of candidates so I thought better list them all and let...

The death last week of economist Milton Friedman has prompted plenty of comments about his attacks on corporate social responsibility.The social responsibility of business, Friedman famously said,...

The costs of Sarbanes-Oxley has prompted some smaller companies to delist themselves from the stock market and "go dark''. Instead of pouring money into accounting and legal costs, they...

Google's extraordinary rise has continued with the company's shares rocketing past $500, turning its employees into millionaires and locking its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin into...

Ken Lay's dead and his lieutenants are either in the slammer or heading there, but Enron's traders are doing very well, thank you very much. It seems that the second biggest bankruptcy in US...

Last week I wrote in this blog entry about how the world's six biggest accounting firms are now calling for changes that include replacing quarterly financial statements with real-time...

Good news for start-ups with Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox flagging that some of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate compliance rules will be eased back. In particular Section...

So you think backdating stock options is legit?Check a new study which has found that hundreds of US company bosses inflated their pay by as much as 10 per cent by secretly backdating share options....

Al Gore was in Australia this week and I got the chance to catch up with him.He granted the interview on the strict condition that I was not to ask him the obvious question about his plans for...