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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The big news in compliance jobs this week comes from Lawson Products (naming a new CCO) and Harley-Davidson (its head of compliance just left). We also have news about Deutsche Bank, Briggs & Stratton, and work anniversaries being celebrated by compliance professionals around the world. I gather these bits of gossip from LinkedIn, news alerts,…
Well, now we know the consequences of imposing pre-taliation agreements upon employees and then using those agreements to stifle SEC investigations or would-be whistleblowers. It’s much more painful than any pre-talation sanctions we’ve seen so far. On Tuesday the SEC fined an Oklahoma oil services company $1.4 million for those pre-taliation abuses—a penalty far larger…
The Securities and Exchange Commission took another whack at corporate pre-taliation agreements Monday, fining a Virginia technology company $180,000 for imposing severance agreements that forbid departing employees from talking to the SEC. The company, NeuStar Inc., had used the agreements with at least 246 employees from 2011 into 2015, according to the SEC. The agreements…
