IES CFO Randy Guba, a graduate of GE's legendary financial management program, tells how market-based realignment and functional integration turned a troubled agglomeration of 27 companies into an industry powerhouse.

While the convergence efforts have been important over the years, it is clear that they will not get us to where we need to be: a single set of standards.

"Janitor's insurance" is helping to pay for bonuses and executive pensions, The Wall Street Journal revealed. Companies are taking out life-insurance policies on low-level employees and listing the firms as beneficiaries. What's the point? Cash and tax benefits. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, these policies "generally include both tax-free accumulation of earnings on the policies’ cash value and tax-free receipt of the death benefit."

Automating GRC can reduce the cost of compliance, but there are two major problems: the size and complexity of the automation challenge and the inability of the GRC discipline to conform to the needs of machine intelligence.

The importance of sophisticated risk management and GRC has reached an all-time high, but if these capabilities are going to become sustainable and integrated facets of corporate strategy, a link needs to be made. That's why Joe Atkinson, a principal with PricewaterhouseCoopers, is a vocal proponent of the need to wed risk management with performance management. He explains how risk management and performance management can be integrated more effectively in this two-part interview.

The U.S. Senate voted 88-6 to confirm Gary Gensler as the new chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC regulates futures and options trading in commodities as well as credit default swaps and financial derivatives.

The practice of risk management has come under fire lately, given the upheaval in the economy. Some of that criticism has been aimed at the use of mathematical models and other risk management tools that were supposed to identify and quantify potential risks. The problem isn't necessarily with the models but with their application, say several Wharton professors in a new report.

How prepared are U.S. companies -- and how prepared should they be -- for IFRS adoption? They are much more prepared than they were 12 months ago, according to a March Deloitte survey. However, 64 percent of respondents to this survey indicated that they have not allocated any budget for IFRS conversion activities. D.J. Gannon, national leader of Deloitte's IFRS Center of Excellence, identified a couple of steps CFOs and corporate finance functions can take now to ease the future implementation burden.

In a new interview, former Comptroller General David Walker delves into the evolving role of internal audit, government accountability, and the materiality of fraud and waste in organizations, among other GRC issues.

Rumblings among financial services industry observers suggest that the government's interpretation of last week's bank stress tests may be a tad optimistic. The initial stress tests "reflect a significant increase in stress across the banking industry," according to Dennis Santiago, the CEO of Institutional Risk Analytics.

What are CFOs, chief risk officers, and other risk-management professionals from more than 500 global companies worried about right now? Unsurprisingly, they’re most concerned about an economic slowdown, according to Aon Corporation’s global risk management survey. Other worries include pending regulatory changes, business interruptions, increasing competition, and commodity price risks.

Now that the comment period on the SEC's proposed road map for the adoption of IFRS by public companies is over, experts are weighing in on the results. D.J. Gannon, national leader of Deloitte's IFRS Center of Excellence, put it succinctly. "The key theme coming from the comment letters is how to achieve a single set of high-quality globally accepted accounting standards," he said. "This is the 'convergence vs. adoption' issue."

Arnold Hanish, the vice president of finance and CAO of Eli Lilly and Co., provides insight into the IFRS conversion in his comment letter on the SEC's IFRS road map Web site.

Dave Kaplan, leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s International Accounting and SEC Services Group, recently fielded a few questions concerning the adoption of international standards by American companies in the video "IFRS or Standards Convergence?" on the Big Fat Finance Blog's Expert Video Forum. Here he responds to readers’ feedback.

Global investors are demanding stricter corporate governance and compliance requirements for publicly held companies. Read this Oracle white paper in the BPM Resource Center to learn more about the issues, new principles, and technologies underlying these new requirements.

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