Once upon a time, way back in the days of the Great Depression, the gentlemen in Congress felt that the securities markets were a trifle unstable. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, there was more than a little panic in the country. As the SEC’s website says:
‘Congress held hearings to identify the problems and search for solutions. Based on the findings in these hearings, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange A...
Recent articles
After years of spiraling fees and countless work hours it appears as though the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, and of being a publicly listed company in general, are finally starting to get under control.
That’s according to a recent survey from Foley & Lardner, ‘The cost of being public in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley’. The law firm worked with KRC Research and utilized data from Standard and Poor’s Investment Services custom business unit t...
On July 25, the SEC announced it would issue a concept release to explore whether US companies should be able to report their financials in International Financial Reporting Standards, or, IFRS.
At first blush, the idea that the US might permit companies to bypass US GAAP seems radical. Not only does it point to how far the world’s accounting standards have already converged, but it confirms that globalization is steadily and irrevocably remaking financial m...
IROs are likely to regard annual general meetings (AGMs) as more of a chore than an eagerly anticipated event. Some disasters serve as reminders that you play dangerously by inviting people who have bet their savings on your success. There’s also the tedium of going through the same old routine every time.
As some companies do meetings better than others, examples provide a useful guide. It’s always easier to please investors when a company’s figures are...
Douglas Ian Shaw is a man with a mantra: ‘keep it simple’. It’s a good rule too, enabling him to keep up with his varied career path and multitude of interests, from sailing his boat ‘Ironic’ to training his Hanoverian warmblood gelding Whiz Kid for dressage competitions. This simple approach also helps him synchronize his duties as investor relations officer and strategist in his duel role as senior vice president and corporate secretary at Suffolk Bancorp...
Canada may be one of the more placid and well-ordered places on the planet, but the country is in the midst of a sharp debate over the future of its fragmented securities regulatory system. Some factions want to see a single securities regulator while others prefer the existing ‘passport’ system where participants deal exclusively with one provincial regulator in addition to a set of harmonized requirements.
The nation is also at work adapting Sarbanes-Oxl...
In mid-October 2001 the Wall Street Journal reported on a special purpose entity (SPE) of Enron that was experiencing financial distress. Given the appearance of financial irregularities, the SEC quickly opened an investigation. On December 2, just six weeks later, Enron took center stage as the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history ($63 billion). The seventh biggest company in the US, Enron never had a down quarter financially but overnight became the poster ch...
The SEC has been busy this year, pursuing options backdaters, launching new compensation disclosure rules and e-proxies, investigating insider trading amidst a massive merger boom and dealing with some more very public governance failures. According to the SEC’s deputy director of enforcement, Walter Ricciardi, the current geyser of enforcement is dispersed across ‘just about every category of case that we bring, from insider trading to the sub-prime mortgage mar...
The importance of maintaining an accurate and efficient process for storing and accessing corporate records has grown in recent years. A flurry of SEC investigations and private or class-action suits have brought the concept of records and information management (RIM) firmly into the consciousness of board directors, C-suite executives, general counsel and corporate secretaries.
As awareness of establishing good RIM policies grows, people are starting to seek...
Aren’t you glad that the Government Accountability Office, a branch of the Federal government better known as the GAO, has assured one and all that Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) does not have undue influence? Don’t you sleep better at night, knowing that an impartial government entity has confirmed that ISS isn’t overly powerful? Not me. ISS drives me crazy. (My wife would say to that: Short drive, huh?)
Writing on his blog right after the GAO...
