FINRA’s Olive Branch on CCO Liability

cco liability

FINRA, the regulator for broker-dealer firms, is trying to ease tensions over chief compliance officer liability with a new alert stressing that FINRA typically will not bring enforcement actions against CCOs personally because compliance officers don’t inherently have a supervisory role at their firms.  FINRA published the alert late last week, after several pleas from…

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Analyzing the Latest CCO Liability Case

cco liability

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a chief compliance officer faces personal legal liability for compliance failures at his firm, and everyone got into a tizzy over it. Then, upon reading the facts of the case, a more complicated picture emerges that demonstrates just how tricky a subject CCO liability can be.  Such…

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Another CCO Liability Proposal

cco liability

The National Society of Compliance Professionals, which represents compliance officers specifically in the financial services world, has released a proposed framework to help regulators understand the threat of chief compliance officer liability and when such liability is or isn’t warranted for a compliance failure. The NSCP released its framework on Monday: a series of nine…

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Proposed: Framework for CCO Liability

cco liability

The New York City Bar Association has proposed a framework that the Securities & Exchange Commission should follow when deciding whether to charge a chief compliance officer for compliance failures at his or her firm.  The framework, announced to the world on Wednesday, addresses points such as when a CCO should be charged for “wholesale…

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Report Urges Action on CCO Liability

cco liability

The New York City Bar Association released a report on Tuesday warning that compliance officer liability continues to be a worrisome part of regulatory enforcement, and called for more guidance about when a compliance officer’s conduct can leave him or her in regulators’ crosshairs. The report focused on compliance officers working in financial services firms,…

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Ack! CCO Liability Is Back Again!

cco liability

Loyal readers of Radical Compliance know that I don’t give much credit to fears of CCO liability for compliance failures. Outside the financial services sector, the risks to a compliance officer are virtually zero, unless you’re grossly negligent or complicit in the misconduct. Within the financial services world, compliance officers do have more worry—and then…

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Enough About CCO Liability!

VW

Compliance officers should welcome the arrest several days ago of Volkswagen’s head of U.S. regulatory compliance—because, at long last, that action seems to be snapping us out of our misplaced fears of compliance officer liability. The compliance executive in question is Oliver Schmidt, who headed VW’s emissions compliance office here in the United States from…

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Can We Calm Down Over CCO Liability?

cco liability

Thank the lord! Yesterday the SEC fined an investment advisory firm and one of its senior managers for failure to prevent insider trading—and did not fault the firm’s chief compliance officer. Now maybe we can all, finally, step back from the fears over CCO liability that have gripped this profession too much. The firm in question…

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Archives, 2022: CCO Certifications

certification

Radical Compliance is taking an off-the-grid vacation for the next few days, so we are reprinting some of readers’ favorite posts from the archives. The following ran in August 2022. Today I want to revisit the Justice Department’s plans to have chief compliance officers certify the effectiveness of their compliance programs, to unpack a question…

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An Accountability Model for AI

AI

Who’s looking for another thoughtful speech about the compliance implications of artificial intelligence? Because we have one from a top banking regulator in the United States, who raises deep issues about AI that go well beyond the banking sector. The speech comes from Michael Hsu, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,…

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