(One You Security) Law enforcement activities surrounding mortgage fraud across the U.S. have resulted in the arrest of thousands, according to reports. The utility of Social Security numbers as means to obtain credit fuels the pervasiveness of mortgage fraud, said Robert Siciliano, widely televised and quoted identity theft protection expert and chief security

In a significant step towards setting up a competitive infrastructure for the Single Euro Payments Area ( SEPA ), SWIFT has agreed with EBA CLEARING that the STEP2 community will benefit from the new SWIFTNet Bulk Payments pricing. The new pricing per payment allows STEP2 participants to exchange low-value payments with the STEP2 service at a price varying between 0.07 and 0.02 eurocents per payment unit.

Banks and corporates will soon be able to exchange trade information over SWIFT, including, from November 2008, Letters of Credit advice and applications. The move follows the SWIFT Board decision on 10 June to extend the SCORE (Standardised CORporate Environment) participant model to include trade messaging, for the first time.

A company with operations abroad looking for some excitement can likely find it by avoiding affirmative management of its risks arising from the potential that corrupt payments are made in its foreign operations. Given the enhanced enforcement environment surrounding corrupt payments abroad, it is a good bet that the failure to affirmatively manage these risks will produce some genuine corporate angst. This opportunity is now also open to those financing such businesses and their foreign operations, especially if they

Introduction
Initial experience with SOX costly, labor-intensive According to most estimates, first-year efforts to comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, widely known as “SOX,” tended to overcompensate by trying to cover too many controls. Stacks of manual assessments and spreadsheets were produced at a very high cost. According to Ernst & Young, first-year SOX filers spent 70 percent

Regulatory risk: Trends and strategies for the CRO is the second in a series of reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Risk Briefing, a research programme targeted at senior executives responsible for managing corporate risk. Alasdair Ross was the author of the report, and Gareth Lofthouse was the editor. The Global Risk Briefing is sponsored by ACE Insurance, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Bank, KPMG and IBM.