Word: audits
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...include demands and risks that many candidates among the ranks of traditional recruits--current and retired top executives, say--aren't willing to accept. Congress, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ all answered calls for reform last year with their respective rule changes. The most substantial changes involve audit committees and outside directors (those without significant financial or family relationships to a company). To help avoid an Enron-like scenario, in which an audit committee doesn't adequately vet auditors' reports, the chairman of that committee must be a financial expert: either a CFO of a public company...
...most welcome new directors are wary of the liabilities they may face under corporate-governance reforms. "The real problem with the old system is that it was relatively easy to pass the buck," says Krishna Palepu, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the functioning of audit committees. "Now that's much more difficult." Hall says he would decline to serve as any board's financial expert (a new rule requires audit committees to disclose whether they have one), despite his years in investment banking and corporate finance. "That's an invitation to a lawsuit," he says...
Palepu says he is optimistic that as companies are forced to find financial experts for their audit committees, they will also start to think more carefully and creatively about all their board seats. Instead of fixating on CEOs, they will tap the likes of venture capitalists, retired partners in accounting firms and retired investment bankers. Rising pay will help generate interest. Until recently, outside directors of publicly traded companies typically received $45,000 to $150,000 a year in cash and stock, based largely on the size of the company and the number of committees a director joined. As directors...
...company, started in 2000 by former broker supervisor David Tilken, sells Broker Audit, software that automatically tracks client-account activity and alerts in-house compliance officers to suspicious doings. As Tilken, 48, politely puts it, the idea is to prevent "accidents"--everything from long-term neglect to mistyped trade orders to ill-advised portfolio strategies to outright fraud...
...landmark summit between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung may have been bought and paid for by Seoul. President Kim's crowning achievement?his 2000 Nobel Peace Prize?may thus be tainted by charges of checkbook diplomacy. After a three-month investigation, the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea declared that, just a week before the summit, $332 million was transferred from the state-run Korea Development Bank into Hyundai Merchant Marine, a subsidiary of the Hyundai conglomerate, which has connections to the North. The business kept $146 million for itself, while $186 million...