As compliance officers wait to see how the Trump Administration might try to change patterns of SEC enforcement, you may want to consider a case last week where the SEC fined a consumer bank for accounting improprieties and whistleblower pre-taliation at the same time. The firm in question is HomeStreet, a bank based in Seattle…
We have lots to cover in this week’s compliance jobs report. Goldman Sachs’ top compliance executive is departing after 13 years, and we have a flurry of new compliance appointments at other firms: DTCC, Loews, CIT Group, ADP, and elsewhere. I gather these bits of gossip from LinkedIn, news alerts, and friends emailing me something…
The House of Representatives recently passed legislation to clip the rulemaking ability of the Securities & Exchange Commission. While that action unto itself should surprise nobody, compliance professionals should heed a larger picture here that could make your jobs much more unpredictable. The first piece of the puzzle is this legislation, the SEC Regulatory Accountability…
The SEC fined investment firm BlackRock $344,000 this week for forcing more than 1,000 employees to sign away their whistleblower rights in severance contracts—although the story here is more about how a little remediation can go a long way. The BlackRock error isn’t anything new: the firm had language in its severance agreements that required employees…
Whatever else we might say about the person who takes the job of compliance counsel at the Trump Organization, we can all agree on one point. That person will have a lock on speaking gigs at compliance industry conferences for a long, long time. We can’t say much more about Trump’s compliance counsel, since his…
This week’s compliance jobs report has a few interesting items. We have promotions happening at Mars and JP Morgan; new hires at United Natural Foods and Vanderbilt University; and Leslie Caldwell is stepping down from the Justice Department. Plus, a lucky compliance professional somewhere has the chance to be compliance counsel to the Trump Organization. I…
The SEC fined defense contractor L-3 Technologies $1.6 million this week for poor accounting controls. The penalty might be small money, but we don’t often see a “pure” books-and-records enforcement action, so compliance officers would do well to examine the lessons learned here. The failures happened as part of a contract L-3 had with the…
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…
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…
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…
