Posted: August 2nd, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
I read a statistic in E*Trade’s annual report that really caught my attention. Speaking about an increase in expenses, “These increases were due primarily to a 212% increase in fraud related losses to $31.2 million for 2006.” (link) I really doubt that this is a statistic that is unique to E*Trade. I think it is also indicative that Security and Identity is going to start being a very hot topic with CIOs.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to get an RSA key. I highly recommend that everyone secures their account the same way, especially if they are running Windows or OSX. I believe that those operating systems are far more susceptible to keylogging than Linux. My review of the key? It is easy to use and you’d be foolish not to get one.
And on an unrelated note, I noticed that E*Trade is experimenting with XBRL for its SEC filings. The SEC is actively driving the change to this new (and open!) format.
Posted: August 1st, 2007 | Author: saldarji | Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
Last week was the 5th anniversary of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The idea for a SOX-like legislation was floated by the Big Six (back then) many years before it was adopted. It took 10 years of lobbying, and several corporate scandals, before the Sarbanes-Oxley act was passed in 2002. There has been an endless amount of criticism and revising of the legislation to make compliance less onerous.
As a former external IT auditor, and a former Internal Auditor, I have to agree with John Dvorak when he says “This stupid law has to go.” At the micro-level, the only people who benefited from Sarbanes-Oxley are the partners at the big four firms, the auditors who are lucky enough to be US citizens, and a small army of underpaid H1B consultants.
Ironically, SOX may actually make it more difficult to pass a set of much-needed Accounting and Finance reforms that the Big 4 is pushing. We are long past the time when we needed paper and pencils to tabulate financial data. Finance and IT staff should be working towards improving the timeliness of information and improving transparency.
On a related but separate note, Sun Microsystems took a step in the right direction when they decided to release their quarterly reports as an RSS feed rather than to the news wires. This type of release makes it more timely for small investors, such as myself. I know that this went mostly unreported in traditional media, but I think it is an incredibly important step for US corporations.
The promise of high tech and this age of high-performance computing is that we can provide real-time reporting and rapidly disseminate information. Unfortunately, we’re squandering these resources by focusing on less important activities while enriching the partners of the Big Four.