Posts Tagged ‘anti-retaliation’
New ECI Report on Complaints, Retaliation
The Ethics & Compliance Initiative published its 2018 Global Business Ethics Survey today, with both good and bad news for corporate compliance officers nudging their companies to higher standards of conduct. The good news (ECI divides the report into “good news” and “bad news” sections) is that fewer employees say they personally witnessed misconduct in…
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 MoreItaly Enacts Whistleblower Protection Law
This just in from the Rome bureau: Italy has passed a whistleblower protection law, bringing the country one step closer to modern anti-corruption standards taking root across Europe. We don’t have all the details yet because, alas, I don’t speak Italian. But a trusted compliance source in Rome alerted me to this article in the…
Read MoreSEC Drops Hammer in New Pre-taliation Case
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…
Read MoreSEC 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 MoreAnother Front in Retaliation Risk: Front Pay
The wide world of whistleblower retaliation risk just grew even wider: a federal judge in New York has upheld the awarding of “front pay” for retaliation lawsuits filed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Front pay is a form of damages akin to winning back pay. The difference: front pay is money awarded for a job you…
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 MoreSEC $3.5 Million Mystery Whistleblower Reward
We received another glimpse into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s thinking about whistleblowers on Friday—although as usual with SEC, details are sketchy and the primary thought is “we support whistleblowers as expansively as possible.” Compliance officers, take note. The glimpse came in the form of a $3.5 million whistleblower reward issued on Friday. To whom?…
Read MoreOf Whistleblower Hotlines and Anti-Retaliation Programs
One of the most slippery tasks for any compliance officer is measuring the effectiveness of your program. And we all know one of the go-to metrics that compliance officers use, even if many secretly wonder how informative that metric really is. We speak, of course, about “hotline statistics.” Just last month, Convercent and Ethisphere published…
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