You may have missed this news, but in a startling turn of events, the Senate Banking Committee has actually decided to do its job: the committee will hold hearings this week for two nominees to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hester Peirce and Lisa Fairfax. The committee had delayed hearings on Peirce and Fairfax for…
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I never expected the Securities and Exchange Commission to appreciate Throwback Thursdays—but that’s what we saw from the SEC yesterday, when it served up a good old-fashioned enforcement action for faulty evaluation of internal controls. The target was Magnum Hunter Resources Corp., an oil services company in Texas (with a name like that, where is else…
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Implementing GRC technology is probably one of the least pleasant tasks compliance officers have to do. I have literally had one compliance officer call me to complain, “We were using Vendor A, and they stunk, so we’re trying Vendor B,” followed by another compliance officer who said, “We were using Vendor B, and they stunk,…
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The Securities and Exchange Commission recently convened a meeting of its Small Company Advisory Committee. Normally news like that would not be big news for securities professionals, except for one point of discussion: overhauling the definition of an accredited investor. We can probably all agree that the current definition is outdated. It was adopted in 1982, and based…
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Nothing beats a good “princeling” case under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for tough, teachable moments that a compliance officer should study. We have that example today, since Qualcomm just paid $7.5 million in fines and penalties to the SEC for its princeling offenses. So let’s take a look. The facts are straightforward. Qualcomm makes…
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Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics’ regional meeting for Boston, a great event organized by local compliance hero Web Hull, one of the nicest people in the business. The agenda covered numerous important topics, so let me focus on one that compliance officers probably hear quite…
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There we were, me and a small group of compliance professionals, talking shop about where good compliance officers come from these days. One person, a recruiter for asset management firms, told the tale of how she recently placed a chief compliance officer at a hedge fund in the Midwest. This CCO was “a dream candidate,”…
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Compliance professionals talk all the time about the importance of a rigorous corporate culture and tone at the top—but rarely do we see such a vivid example of those two items like we did earlier this month thanks to the management spat at Bridgewater Associates, a huge hedge fund in bucolic Connecticut. Compliance officers couldn’t…
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We all know financial services firms are under tremendous pressure today to improve their compliance and risk management functions. What’s been less clear is how those pressures are influencing firms when they are selecting chief compliance officers. Now we have some better insight into that, and it raises some interesting career questions for compliance officers…
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Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission set another precedent in regulatory enforcement: for the first time ever, it reached a deferred-prosecution deal with an executive (rather than a company) over foreign bribery charges. This is not exactly welcome news for corporate compliance officers. The executive is Yu Kai Yuan, a Chinese national who worked in…
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