Let’s all be honest: the Securities and Exchange Commission is not known for a sense of humor. This is too bad, because at least some individual SEC employees I’ve met over the years have been quite funny. Their inner comedian yearns to break free in a litigation release or SEC comment letter, only to be…
Read MoreEven before Uber’s board met this weekend to consider putting CEO Travis Kalanick on leave, this company fascinated me. It should fascinate every compliance professional, really—since Uber demonstrates so many ways that things can go wrong through inattention to governance, ethics, and compliance. A full litany of Uber’s problems is available from a New York…
Read MoreA busy week for compliance jobs and personnel news! We have new compliance officers at Puma, MiraMed, BNP Paribas, and Alexion Pharmaceuticals. Promotions at a few other places, and compliance job openings at the Justice Department and National Commercial Vehicle. Read on… I gather these bits of information from LinkedIn, news alerts, and friends emailing…
Read MoreThe Justice Department’s top official to oversee FCPA enforcement was nominated this week to serve as a federal district judge in Virginia, yet another departure from the executive branch leaving corporate compliance officers wondering who is in charge over there. The Trump Administration nominated Trevor McFadden earlier this week to the federal district of Virginia. McFadden…
Read MoreNo surprise here: the Justice Department is parting ways with its in-house compliance counsel, Hui Chen, who had raised eyebrows lately with thinly veiled attacks against Donald Trump on social media. The department began advertising Wednesday for a new compliance counsel, and confirmed to the National Law Journal that, yes, Chen is departing after 20…
Read MoreOn Monday the Justice Department charged a 25-year-old woman with leaking classified intelligence to the media. Say what you will about the woman’s patriotism, brains, or motivation. Compliance and audit executives have plenty of lessons to learn in this case-study of security controls in the modern era. The woman is Reality Leigh Winner. As you…
Read MoreCompliance officers already know that ever more often, your job intersects with the need for effective management of data. How companies do that can vary immensely from one organization to the next, but clearly this obligation is evolving toward a single, specific person overseeing that responsibility. So when I saw a recent paper exploring the…
Read MoreThis week we have a new senior compliance executive at Hewlett-Packard, promotions at JP Morgan, Chubb, and GSK; a new head of internal audit at Black Line; and two compliance jobs in the financial world—plus a fair bit of other personnel news and industry gossip. I gather these bits of information from LinkedIn, news alerts,…
Read MoreCompliance and audit executives, set your countdown clocks: a new type of audit report will be arriving at your organization three years from now. Today the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board finally adopted a new standard for the report, which will require more disclosure of “critical audit matters” that weigh on the mind of your…
Read MoreEarlier this month we had a post about ransomware, and the rather unsettling idea that under some circumstances, a victim of ransomware might not have legal obligation to disclose the incident. As promised, today we’re going to explore a few more threads related to the subject—since it poses a god-awful mess of risk, that compliance…
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