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…
Read More
So the Trump Administration has nominated a new SEC chairman in the form of Jay Clayton, dealmaker and securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. The compliance community’s reaction seems to be vague concern, based on a paper Clayton co-authored in 2011 criticizing FCPA enforcement. Let me posit another idea: you’re reading the wrong paper. If…
Read More
The 2017 conference cycle gets underway this week, and we have a new leader in the contest for oddest pairing of speaker and event: actor Jeffrey Tambor will be the closing keynote at ISACA’s IT controls conference in May. The 2017 North America CACS conference (computer audit, control and security) happens May 1-3 out in…
Read More
The SEC handed out its first whistleblower reward of 2017 on Friday—a $5.5 million prize that expanded potential eligibility for whistleblower rewards yet again, in a small way. In this instance, the whistleblower provided valuable, original information to the SEC, but apparently did not give the tip “in writing” when he or she first approached…
Read More
It’s a doozy of a compliance jobs report to start 2017, since so many people were updating their LinkedIn profiles or starting new positions with the arrival of the new year. We have news about Duetsche Bank, General Motors, the VHA, Samsung, United Health, and many more. I gather these bits of gossip from LinkedIn,…
Read More
A round of applause to FFF Enterprises, a distributor of healthcare products that crafted a great job post looking for a chief compliance officer at its North Carolina offices. First, the job itself sounds as reasonable as any CCO posting we might see. The compliance officer reports directly to the CEO and oversees the functioning of the…
Read More
The farce that unfolded in the House of Representatives this week over the independent Office of Congressional Ethics is an important reminder for compliance professionals—of just how weak the Republican grasp on power actually is, and how much (or how little) Washington might accomplish in the coming year. What happened, essentially, was this. First, Republicans lawmakers…
Read More
Welcome back to the grind, everyone! Before we all go back to audit committee meetings, anti-corruption training, and committing your travel budget before the CFO implements a freeze, let’s take a look at what events in 2017 will carry big consequences for the compliance community. The arrival of the Trump Administration in particular sets up…
Read More
Compliance professionals in the financial sector might feel a bit uneasy and gloomy these days. Your career prospects, conventional wisdom says, are not as secure as they used to be. People might be tempted to cite the election of Donald Trump, and his distaste for just about every regulation he can find, as the cause of this…
Read More
Chief compliance officers tend to serve on lots of committees: a compliance risk committee, investigation committees, emerging risk task forces, and so forth. As one compliance officer told me, “I live for the conference table.” So today let’s look at some wise practices for managing committees. Lately I’ve been reading Passion for Leadership by former…
Read More