Last month, I asked you if brand and reputational risk qualifies as a top strategic concern. A new survey suggests that it sure does.

A new survey from EisnerAmper, the country’s 15th largest public accounting firm, finds that reputational risks qualify as a top board concern. The survey polled 140 board members from public and private companies (31 percent of respondents serve on audit committees).

Other than financial risk, respondents were asked to identify risks of most concern; 69 percent identified reputational risk as their primary concern. Regulatory and compliance risk, which topped last year’s survey, was a close second at 61 percent. These concerns were followed by CEO Succession Planning at 55 percent and IT Risk at 51 percent. more

The Summer 2011 Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project takes a comprehensive look at current trends in lending and investing among a variety of funding sources: banks, private investors and friends and family. More than 2,500 business owners and investors and lenders participated in the survey. Among the highlights:

• As the economy recovers—albeit fitfully—more business owners are seeking bank funding. More than 60 percent of bank respondents said loan demand had grown over the past six months.

• At the same time, financing from friends and family members appears to be on the wane; just 21 percent of respondents were tapping into this source of funding compared with 35 percent in the Fall 2010 survey. more

Sony. Citibank. The International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The list of organizations victimized by information security breaches grows every day. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse maintains a “chronology” of major data breaches, and the organization updates this list every two days or so.

Scrolling through the list is sobering – and it should be.

“This is nearly a daily occurrence,” says Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist. “And professionals in the business will tell you that what you read about is the tip of a very large iceberg. A lot of the security breaches that occur within enterprise networks … don’t incur the kind of losses that make the front page. They’re still important, they’re still troublesome and they are increasing in frequency.” more

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will result in some 200 rules, promulgated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the SEC, the CFTC, the FDIC and a host of others, according to information from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Not surprisingly, not all the rules have moved it through the regulatory process as quickly as lawmakers initially envisioned. On June 15, 2011, for instance, the SEC announced that it was providing temporary relief from the security-based swap provisions of Dodd-Frank that would otherwise go into effect on July 16. The Commission also granted temporary relief from compliance with most of the new Exchange Act requirements that would otherwise apply on July 16. “This is the first step in a series of actions the SEC intends to take in coming days to address effective date issues,” said Robert Cook, director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, in the announcement. “Temporarily and to the extent appropriate, our goal is to preserve the pre-Dodd-Frank Act legal framework until we complete the rulemaking tasks and develop a workable implementation plan.” more

When I talked to Jeff Westphal, president and CEO of tax software firm Vertex Inc., recently he pointed to hyper-regulation as the most dominant trend in tax worldwide as nations struggle to resolve the sovereign debt crisis without explicitly raising tax rates. Here are four more key trends he sees dominating the global tax outlook for the next few years:

1. The convergence of finance and tax. CFOs and tax directors are working more closely together, driven by endlessly escalating transparency requirements for U.S. publicly traded multinationals. “Tax has been like a black box, but this regulatory environment is causing more CFOs to say ‘I’ve got to know what’s inside the box, and I have to know that it’s as tight as a drum, just like the rest of our finance operation,’” Westphal notes. more