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US Congress (us + congress)
Selected AbstractsSarbanes Oxley Section 404 Costs of Compliance: a case studyCORPORATE GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2007Lineke Sneller In 2002 US Congress approved the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX). Section 404 requires companies to assess their internal controls and acquire an attestation of this assessment from their external auditor. In this paper, we investigate the costs of compliance of this assessment and attestation. The European division of a US listed company is used as a case study. The divisional project approach is described, and costs of compliance for this division are presented in two categories: assessment costs, mainly hours spent by internal staff; and attestation costs, mainly audit fees. The case study shows that the internal hours spent on assessment are approximately 12 times higher than the initial estimate made by the SEC in 2002, and that the realised other expenses are approximately 1.4 times higher than this estimate. Furthermore, a year on year increase of 50 per cent of the company's audit fee in the first year of Section 404 compliance is found. Companies can reduce the costs of compliance by implementing programmed controls, using auditors from countries with lower rates, remediating material weaknesses only, focusing on the internal control system rather than on individual controls, and by encouraging the auditor to rely on the company's assessment. [source] Tools for planning and coordinating development of medical countermeasures in the public sectorDRUG DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009Ian Manger Abstract In spite of significant increases in biodefense spending in the 7 years since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the United States may not yet be fully prepared to respond effectively to many potential biothreats. The principal reasons appear to be that: (1) the problem is extremely complex, and the metrics for success are often unclear; (2) although the US Congress has allocated substantial resources for this effort, these funds are insufficient for the task as initially conceived, i.e., "one drug for each bug;" and (3) there is insufficient coordination among the many agencies working to achieve the goal of protecting the nation from biothreats. In the last few years, much of the biodefense community has come to recognize that an approach that focuses on developing and stockpiling a medical countermeasure (MCM) for each possible biothreat agent is unachievable for reasons of cost, time, and the sheer diversity of emerging threats. Promising alternative models are emerging, including broad spectrum and technology platform approaches, but the requisite cross-agency planning and coordination, although improving, is still problematic. We have developed a set of software tools and methods for using them that could support the desired coordination and that could also provide for more rapid, comprehensive, and shared identification of key enabling technologies for accomplishing the development of effective medical countermeasures in time to counter or prevent a biothreat. The tools and methods could also make possible a collaborative public-private partnership for the development of MCM, which many believe is critical to success. Drug Dev Res 70:327,334, 2009 © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] More power to the European Parliament?ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 35 2002Abdul G. Noury SUMMARY Many observers have expressed scepticism about granting more power to the European Parliament. The sceptics believe that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) do not vote in a disciplined way and that they vote more often with their country group than with their European Party. Using a unique database consisting of all roll call votes by each individual MEP between 1989 and 1999 (over 6000 votes by over 1000 different MEPs), we show that the sceptics are wrong. Our data shows clearly that MEPs vote more along party lines than along country lines. Party cohesion is comparable to that of the US Congress and is increasing over time whereas country cohesion is low and declining. In short, politics in the European Parliament generally follows the traditional left,right divide that one finds in all European nations. These findings are valid across issues, even on issues like the structural and cohesion funds where one would expect country rather than party cohesion. In votes where the EP has the most power , those held under the so-called co-decision procedure , MEPs participate more and are more party-cohesive. In our opinion, this unique empirical analysis provides grounds for justifying a generalization of the co-decision procedure. [source] European Parliament and Executive Federalism: Approaching a Parliament in a Semi-Parliamentary DemocracyEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 5 2003Philipp Dann This paper proposes an understanding of the European Parliament not along theories about what the EU should become, but what it is and surely will continue to be, that is a very distinct federal structure. The European Parliament is a parliament in an executive federalism,with far-reaching consequences for its form and functions. After outlining the characteristics of this federal structure, these consequences will be demonstrated by analysing the European Parliament in contrast with two ideal types of parliaments: the working parliament, separated from the executive branch and centred around strong committees (like the US Congress), and the debating parliament, characterised by the fusion of parliamentary majority and government as well as plenary debates (like the British House of Commons). Dwelling thus on a comparison to a legislature in a non-parliamentary federal system, like the US Congress, this paper argues that the European Parliament might best be understood as a special case of a working parliament. Finally, it will be proposed to consider the influence of executive federalism not only as fundamentally shaping the European Parliament but also as rendering the EU generally a semi-parliamentary democracy. [source] Delegation of Regulatory Powers in a Mixed PolityEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002Giandomenico Majone It is a common place of academic and political discourse that the EC/EU, being neither a parliamentary democracy nor a separation-of-powers system, must be a sui generis polity. Tocqueville reminds us that the pool of original and historically tested constitutional models is fairly limited. But however limited, it contains more than the two systems of rule found among today's democratic nation states. During the three centuries preceding the rise of monarchical absolutism in Europe, the prevalent constitutional arrangement was ,mixed government',a system characterised by the presence in the legislature of the territorial rulers and of the ,estates' representing the main social and political interests in the polity. This paper argues that this model is applicable to the EC, as shown by the isomorphism of the central tenets of the mixed polity and the three basic Community principles: institutional balance, institutional autonomy and loyal cooperation among European institutions and Member States. The model is then applied to gain a better understanding of the delegation problem. As is well known, a crucial normative obstacle to the delegation of regulatory powers to independent European agencies is the principle of institutional balance. By way of contrast, separation-of-powers has not prevented the US Congress from delegating extensive rule-making powers to independent commissions and agencies. Comparison with the philosophy of mixed government explains this difference. The same philosophy suggests the direction of regulatory reform. The growing complexity of EC policy making should be matched by greater functional differentiation, and in particular by the explicit acknowledgement of an autonomous ,regulatory estate'. At a time when the Commission aspires to become the sole European executive, as in a parliamentary system, it is particularly important to stress the importance of separating the regulatory function from general executive power. The notion of a regulatory estate is meant to emphasise this need. [source] Commerce and Imagination: The Sources of Concern about International Human Rights in the US CongressINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2010Ellen A. Cutrone Do members of Congress put human rights concerns on the agenda in response to their constituents' demands for trade protection? Humanitarian concern may be an important motive, but the normative weight of these issues also makes them a potentially powerful tool for politicians with less elevated agendas. They may criticize the behavior of countries with whom their constituents must compete economically, while overlooking the actions of countries with which their constituents have more harmonious economic relations. This paper tests several hypotheses about the salience of human rights concerns in the politics of US foreign policy using data on congressional speeches during the late 1990s gathered from the Congressional Record. We find evidence that, while humanitarian interests remain an important motive for raising human rights issues, the economic interests of their constituents influence which members of Congress speak out on these questions, and the countries on which they focus their concern. [source] The US 9/11 Commission on Border ControlPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2004Article first published online: 30 SEP 200 The collapse of Europe's Communist regimes and the breakup of the Soviet Union marked the end of the "short twentieth century" and appeared to have opened up an era of accelerating globalization,increasingly free movement of goods and capital and, if not yet free movement of persons, certainly travel less hindered by bureaucratic obstacles. The threat of international terrorism, however, places a major question mark on such expectations. The magnitude of this threat was shown by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on US targets in New York and Washington. The attacks have led to greatly increased security checks on international travel and, especially in the United States, to tightened visa regulations and border controls. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, created by the US Congress and the President in 2002, submitted its final report in July 2004. The analysis of the terrorist threat and the recommendations on how to counter it offered in this 567-page document suggest that restrictions on crossing US international borders are unlikely to be eased soon and may well be made stricter. The practical inconvenience of such measures, however, may be lessened by improvements in the technological means of identifying persons, such as through use of biological markers. Relevant passages of the 9/11 Commission Report, from Chapter 12, section 4, are reproduced below. Footnotes have been omitted. [source] On the Tasks of a Population Commission: A 1971 Statement by Donald RumsfeldPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2003Article first published online: 20 APR 200 In its most familiar form, analytic assessment of the impact of demographic change on human affairs is the product of a decentralized cottage industry: individual scholars collecting information, thinking about its meaning, testing hypotheses, and publishing their findings. Guidance through the power of the purse and through institutional design that creates and sustains cooperating groups of researchers can impose some order and coherence on such spontaneous activity. But the sum total of the result may lack balance and leave important aspects of relevant issues inadequately explored. Even when research findings are picked up by the media and reach a broader public, the haphazardness of that process helps further to explain why the salience of population change to human welfare and its importance in public policymaking are poorly understood. The syndrome is not unique to the field of population, but the typically long time-lags with which aggregate population change affects economic and social phenomena make it particularly difficult for the topic to claim public attention. A time-tested, if less than fool-proof remedy is the periodic effort to orchestrate a systematic and thorough examination of the causes, consequences, and policy implications of demographic processes. Because the most potent frame for policymaking is the state, the logical primary locus for such stocktaking is at the country level. The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future was a uniquely ambitious enterprise of this sort. The Commission was established by the US Congress in 1970 as a result of a presidential initiative. Along with the work of two earlier British Royal Commissions on population, this US effort, mutatis mutandis, can serve as a model for in-depth examinations conducted at the national level anywhere. Chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the Commission submitted its final report to President Richard M. Nixon in March 1972. The background studies to the report were published in seven hefty volumes; an index to these volumes was published in 1975. Reproduced below is a statement to the Commission delivered on April 14, 1971 by Donald Rumsfeld, then Counsellor to President Nixon and in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity. (Currently, Mr. Rumsfeld serves as US Secretary of Defense.) The brief statement articulates with great clarity the objectives of the Commission and the considerations that prompted them. The text originally appeared in Vol. 7 (pp. 1-3) of the Commission's background reports, which contains the statements at public hearings conducted by the Commission. National efforts toward comprehensive scientific reviews of population issues have their analogs at the international level. Especially notable on that score were the preparatory studies presented at the 1954 Rome and 1965 Belgrade world population conferences. The world population conferences that took place in Bucharest in 1974, in Mexico City in 1984, and in Cairo in 1994 were intergovernmental and political rather than scientific and technical meetings, but they also generated a fair amount of prior research. The year 2004 will break the decadal sequence of large-scale international meetings on population, and apart from the quadrennial congresses of the IUSSP, which showcase the voluntary research offerings of its members, none is being planned for the coming years. A partial substitute will be meetings organized by the UN's regional economic and social commissions. The first of these took place in 2002 for the Asia-Pacific region; the meetings for the other regions will be held in 2003-04. The analytic and technical contribution of these meetings, however, is expected to be at best modest. National efforts of the type carried out 30 years ago by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future would be all the more salutary. [source] Legislative Representation, Bargaining Power and the Distribution of Federal Funds: Evidence from the US Congress,THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 532 2008Brian Knight This article investigates the relationship between representation in legislatures and the geographic distribution of federal funds. In a legislative bargaining model, we demonstrate that funds are concentrated in high representation areas, and two channels underlie this result. The proposal power channel reflects the role of representation in committee assignments, and the vote cost channel reflects the role of representation in coalition formation. In our empirical analysis, we find that small states, relative to large states, receive more funding in the US Senate, relative to the House. We also find empirical support for the two channels underlying this relationship. [source] Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for ConservationANTIPODE, Issue 3 2010Catherine Corson Abstract:, By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy-making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the conditions for the formation of a dynamic alliance among representatives of the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development, environmental NGOs and the private sector around biodiversity conservation. In this alliance, idealized visions of NGOs as civil society and a countering force to corporations have underpinned their influence, despite their contemporary corporate partnerships. Furthermore, by focusing on,international,biodiversity conservation, the group has attracted a broad spectrum of political and corporate support to shape public policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion. [source] Truth and Fiction: A Study of the Gender Gap in the US National LegislaturePOLITICS, Issue 3 2001Stephanie L. Hallett In the United States, women are generally perceived to vote more liberally than men. Analysing voting patterns from 12 US Congresses (the 94th to 105th Congress) on a range of political issues, I conduct an estimation explaining voting behaviour by gender, differences in party identification and affiliation with different geographical regions in the United States. My results indicate that women do generally vote more liberally than men, but this difference can be attributed to differences in party identification and regional representation more than to gender differences. [source] | |||||||||||||