According to consulting firm Protiviti’s 2015 Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Survey, the costs of Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance continue to increase, even though the statute has been on the books for 13 years. Factors that have prevented SOX compliance costs from reaching a steady state include the new COSO internal control framework (see…
The question of where a compliance department should reside within the corporate configuration is getting significant attention by…
SEC officials have expressed concern that companies are not properly identifying and disclosing material weaknesses in internal controls,…
Over the past weeks there has been a lively debate in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, about the efficacy of so-called deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and, more specifically, on whether Canada should adopt a DPA regime as part of its toolkit for responding to corporate wrongdoing. As we…
We asked Mini vandePol (Head of the Baker & McKenzie Global and Asia-Pacific Compliance Practice Group) and Joanna Ludlam…
Effectively managing corporate compliance efforts in today’s regulatory environment–preventing corporate officers and employee from engaging in illegal practices,…
On April 26, 2015, a new law requiring companies to have compliance programs came into effect in Ukraine. The law applies to almost all companies participating in public tenders and to state owned enterprises over a certain size. Among other things, it requires companies to appoint a compliance officer with…
On March 18, 2015, President Dilma Roussef signed Decree 8.420/2015, which regulates certain features of the Clean Companies…
As regulators and prosecutors across many jurisdictions increasingly cooperate in cross-border anti-corruption enforcement efforts, the importance of an…
Various countries and their compliance-enforcing agencies request that companies have “adequate” compliance programs and organizations. But what does that mean? One option to determine whether a compliance program and organization is adequate is to compare the company’s own program and organization with the compliance efforts of other companies (industry standard).…