Macquarie Securities has been ordered to pay about $23 million ($35 million AUD) after Australia’s New South Wales Supreme Court found the firm responsible for years of inaccurate short sale reporting caused by failures in its internal systems and controls.
In a recent LinkedIn post, I posed a question that has quietly lingered in governance circles for years. If courts in the United States have already made clear that boards are expected to oversee risks tied to Mission Critical Objectives, why haven’t regulators directly addressed deficient board oversight in this area?
Sweden’s financial regulator has launched an investigation into Svenska Handelsbanken to determine whether the bank has met its obligations under anti-money laundering rules.
Governance frameworks have made genuine progress on audit independence. Dual reporting lines - administrative to the CFO, functional to the audit committee - are now standard in most mature organizations. The IIA Global Internal Audit Standards codify functional reporting to the board. Audit committee charters address it. Regulators ask about it.
If you want credibility and trust from management, your reports need not only to be accurate but also fair and balanced. Let me give you a real-life example from my time as a VP in IT at a large financial institution.
The UK Financial Conduct Authority has fined John Wood Group £12,993,700 after concluding the company published misleading financial information in several of its recent earnings announcements.
A brokerage firm owned by Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay a $1.3 million fine after regulators found the firm failed to properly review whether its customers were receiving the best available trade executions.