Compliance officers should watch the unfolding mess at Fox News with a great deal of unease. The sexual harassment claims against its star talk show host, Bill O’Reilly, have nothing to do with regulatory compliance per se—but they have much to do with corporate values and culture, an important but blurry part of the compliance…
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Kara Brockmeyer, head of the FCPA Enforcement unit at the Securities and Exchange Commission since its creation in 2011, will leave her job later this month. The SEC announced the news in a press release on April 4. The statement didn’t say where Brockmeyer may go next or why she is leaving, although Brockmeyer is only…
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Another year, another eye-popping amount of money spent by Walmart on its long-running FCPA investigation—with no end in sight. Walmart spent $99 million on FCPA matters last year, according to the annual report it published March 31: $80 million for the investigation itself, plus another $19 million spent on “enhancements to its global compliance program.”…
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The compliance community has a fresh example of a large misusing performance incentives and souring corporate conduct along the way. This time the company is Citizens Financial Group. Last week the Wall Street Journal had a fascinating feature story about Citizens, citing 11 current and former employees who said they faked data about calls placed…
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We wrap up the first quarter with big news: the head of internal audit at LinkedIn is taking his leave after six years there. (So says his profile on, well, you know where.) We also have compliance jobs news at Ellsworth Adhesives and RiverSource, plus a spate of new product and investment news from the compliance…
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Don’t die of shock, but a new study suggests that the bright idea from Congress five years ago to goose the IPO market by relaxing governance standards for new public companies hasn’t accomplished much. Those filers, Emerging Growth Companies, were created by the JOBS Act of 2012. A study released by the Public Company Accounting…
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The Ethics & Compliance Initiative has lined up Attorney General Jeff Sessions to speak at its annual conference next month. It will be one of the first times Sessions speaks at length about corporate misconduct and the compliance function’s role in preventing it. Landing a sitting attorney general to speak at a compliance conference is…
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Compliance officers who want a glimpse of your future, look no further than the spectacle that unfolded Sunday morning at Denver International Airport: a tale of policy management mismanaged, reputation risk, and plenty of commentary on social media. Some day, some way, a headache like this will be yours. This time the lucky company was…
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Volvo Car Group has announced a new chief compliance officer, picking him up from Dassault Systems. Louis Berger (which is a company) named a new chief integrity officer. We also have personnel moves at Ortho Clinical, Centene, and Meritor, among other companies. And Preet Bharara, recently fired as U.S. attorney, has his first new job.…
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The Senate Banking Committee held its confirmation hearing today for Jay Clayton, the Trump Administration’s nominee to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. We have a few nuggets of detail worth an ethics & compliance officer’s attention, although the hearing mostly unfolded along predictable lines. On one side were Clayton and Republican members of the…
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