Search results for: pre-taliation
SEC Strikes Again on Pre-taliation
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…
Read MoreSEC Just Put Pre-taliation Risk Front & Center
The SEC said this week that it will begin looking for signs of pre-taliation risks during routine examinations of registered investment advisers—the clearest sign yet that pre-taliation risk is here to stay, and that the SEC takes a serious, expansive view of the subject. Word of the SEC’s intentions came in an alert released Monday…
Read MorePre-taliation: This Is Not a Hard Concept
Much has been said about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crackdown on so-called “pretaliation” clauses in employment contracts, and we’re going to say even more today since the SEC announced a new enforcement action this week. But fundamentally, all the concern about pretaliation comes down to one question, that can be answered with one word.…
Read MoreA Final Burst of Antitrust Guidance
The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have published new guidelines on how prosecutors will evaluate companies’ employment agreements, information-sharing arrangements, and other practices that might violate antitrust law, even as the Biden Administration glides out the door. The two agencies released the guidelines (a slim 13 pages long) on Thursday. The guidelines review the…
Read MoreInternal Controls Come for Trump
At long last, we have an internal controls and compliance angle on Donald Trump’s courtroom drama! When Trump was ordered last week to pay $355 million in damages for his civil fraud trial in New York, the judge in the case also ordered the Trump Organization to hire a director of financial compliance. This person,…
Read MoreCongress Tries Anew on Whistleblower Fixes
Several big names in the Senate have filed legislation that would clarify the protections for whistleblowers who first report their concerns to internal compliance teams and force the SEC to decide whistleblower awards more quickly. Dubbed the “SEC Whistleblower Reform Act,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, filed the bill last week along…
Read MoreJPMorgan Replies on Retaliation Claim
We have an update on that lawsuit filed last year by a former compliance officer at JP Morgan, who says she was fired for raising concerns about weaknesses in the bank’s compliance program. JPMorgan has now filed a motion to dismiss, and depicts the former compliance officer as a terrible employee who was fired for…
Read MoreSupreme Court Whistleblower Ruling, Already in Play
Well, we have our first instance of a company citing last month’s Supreme Court ruling against Dodd-Frank whistleblower protections to argue against a whistleblower retaliation award. Bio-Rad Laboratories, ordered last year to pay $11 million in a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit, was back in court earlier this week arguing that its damages should be cut by…
Read MoreFighting Harassment Where It Lives
Compliance professionals who want to talk about sexual harassment this morning have a big problem: too many examples to choose from. We could start with Harvey Weinstein, and the misgovernance at his production company; just read the Financial Times article from this weekend reviewing the conflicts of interest and boardroom machinations that torpedoed internal investigations…
Read MoreSEC Clips Whistleblower Reward for Misconduct
I didn’t notice this SEC enforcement until now, but 10 days ago the agency doled out a whistleblower award—and trimmed the final prize to the tipster, because that person both participated in the misconduct and took his sweet time before alerting the SEC. Alas, we don’t know many more details about this case. We don’t…
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