NEWS
- The Role and Responsibilities of the Audit Committee in a changing corporate landscape
Copenhagen Compliance together with Grant Thornton and Pinsent Masons has taken the initiative to create a UK chapter of The Audit Committee. The purpose is to provide guidance on the updated compliance requirements on audit quality, standards and reporting requirements. Based on the recent UK legislation, the audit committee members must review their role & responsibility, evaluate the reporting and disclosure framework and assess the detailed requirements for future statutory audits.
- An efficient sanyaku-kai could have avoided the Toshiba’s accounting scandal?
The Japanese tea ceremony ritual is often familiar when a top corporate executive bows and admits to his company’s wrongdoings. However, the recent Japanese corporate scandals go much further. The Chairman and or the CEO resigns, fires a scapegoat or sometimes even commits harakiri. In the past few years, several large Japanese corporations – from cosmetics maker Kanebo to brokerage Nikko Cordial, and machinery giant IHI to optical equipment manufacturer Olympus, they all admitted to fraudulent accounting or profit manipulation. Currently one of the biggest Japanese corporate names – Toshiba, is in the firing line.
- In future, the buck stops with the audit committee
Audit committee members in general and external auditors, in particular, are the most important gatekeepers to provide attention to financial reporting and financial fraud processes. Each function has a responsibility to foster high-quality of reliable financial reporting and disclosures. Stakeholders are also dependent on and recognise that both groups exercise a significant amount of judgment on a day-to-day basis and are not in the business of second-guessing good faith judgments. Therefore, we have created an Audit Committee Network to provide guidance on the implications of audit regulation and directives, to restore integrity and trust to companies, markets, and the stakeholders.
- The Statutory Accountants are at their wit's end when it comes to advisory services
Both the audit and consulting trades have lofty ambitions to capture the consulting market that continue to be on the rise. However, it often sends the big audit companies on a challenging and ethical tightrope whether to focus on auditing or delivering advisory or doing both within the framework of the new auditor and audit committee responsibilities.
- Five reasons to start using Blockchain Technology in Risk and Compliance activities
As compliance costs are surging, many companies are now in the process of reducing and eliminating GRC jobs as they digitise the GRC processes. This change is especially valid for financial institutions that are forced to ending the hiring boom to pay some of the $321 billion in fines from recent years.
- Get to know the Blockchain component of Distributed-Ledger Technology now (Part I/II)
Blockchain as a technology, will have a corporate and social impact on business processes and applications. Therefore Copenhagen Compliance® has already conducted several seminars and sessions on how blockchain will impact the business in general and specific industries in particular. In this article we review the role that blockchain technology has to play in enabling global trade while addressing industry-specific sustainability issues (e.g. corruption and fraud, carbon data and ship recycling)?
- The need of Governance and IT-Governance; a human hand behind all automated controls as there are no such thing as fully automated IT-controls!
It is more important than ever to have a good IT-Governance structure and under control, as we are more exposed today in a much more complex IT-environment than in the past. The risk map needs to be redrawn continually and in different dimensions. Some of the risk areas that have emerged such as on the compliance agenda within the General Data Protection Legislation, an increased velocity regarding the Cloud services with the inherent risks for cyber-attacks and hacking. The inevitable digitalisation gives opportunities as well as business risks. All these risks and combined risks examples are issues that must be on the board of directors' agenda - compliance, internal control, IT-infrastructure and business risk linked to IT.
- An independent risk and compliance review is often a reasonable strategy to get back on track Part I of II
Copenhagen Compliance® has developed a third-party assessment of the financial company's regulatory framework. The aim is to perform a clear eyes review on the costs and headcount components of regulatory compliance and assess the quality and validity of the practical implementation.
