General
Study: SEC Tweeting Cuts Misconduct
Let it never be said that arcane bits of academic research have no relevance to corporate compliance! A grad student at Yale has found that regional SEC offices’ robust use of Twitter correlates to reduced insider trading, customer complaints against investment advisers, and financial misreporting. I came across this study last week — on Twitter,…
Read MoreMore on the Challenges of Listen-Up Culture
Today we have a disturbing lesson on ethics and compliance from New Hampshire, where police are frantically searching for a seven-year-old girl who apparently has been missing since 2019 — because nobody took the girl’s drug-addled mother seriously while she tried to raise alarms about her daughter for months. The girl is Harmony Montgomery. She…
Read MorePointers on Setting Compliance Goals
Today we return to the compliance officer bookshelf. I just began reading Get It Done, a newly released book by business professor Ayelet Fishbach, that examines how people can motivate themselves to change their behavior. The first chapter alone raises excellent points about how to set goals that people want to achieve — a subject…
Read MoreJP Morgan, Part II: The Consultant Agreement
Today I want to revisit that enforcement action against JP Morgan from last week, because there’s more here that compliance officers need to consider. We need to talk about the compliance consultant JP Morgan has to hire as part of its settlement. In our first post about this scandal last Friday, we looked at the…
Read MoreA Messy Picture for Risks in 2022
Consulting firm Protiviti recently published its annual survey of enterprise risks worrying corporate leaders for the coming year. As always, the survey is worth a look so you can decipher what might be on the minds of your board and C-suite, and then anticipate the ways they’ll likely exasperate you over the next 12 months.…
Read MoreNotes on Cybersecurity and Operational Risk
Last week one of the country’s top banking regulators published its semi-annual report on risks to the financial system, and to no surprise cybersecurity risk was near the top. The more one ponders the findings, however, the more you can see insights about cybersecurity, internal control, and innovation that are worth the time of a…
Read MoreChina’s New Anti-Corruption Maneuver
It seems that China is revising its anti-corruption rules to give it a stronger hand in prosecuting overseas corporations that bribe government officials, in case you need yet another headache in your compliance officer life. We don’t know the exact details of the new rules or even have a copy of them available to the…
Read MoreMore on Senior-Level Compliance Jobs
Last week I had a post exploring whether senior-level compliance jobs are becoming harder to land, and some possible reasons why that might be. The post led to numerous compliance officers sending me some of their own observations; with their permission (and some confidential details scrubbed out), let’s dig a bit deeper into what’s going…
Read MoreDispatches From the Job Hunt
Two compliance friends, both quite accomplished in their careers, recently contacted me to ask essentially the same question. In today’s job market supposedly so plagued with labor shortages, why does hiring for upper-level compliance jobs feel so slow and difficult? I’ve done no rigorous study to confirm that the experience of my two friends reflects…
Read MoreMore SEC Talk on Cyber, Internal Control
Before this particular bit of news sails downstream, internal control professionals might want to note that an SEC commissioner spoke this week about the importance of internal controls for cybersecurity. She raised a few points worth considering. The remarks came from Caroline Crenshaw, a Democratic appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission who, in my…
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