Posts Tagged ‘pre-taliation’
Pre-Taliation in Trump Fraud Trial!
Well this is about as surprising as sunrise in the east: a hot corporate compliance issue just made a guest appearance in the civil fraud trial against Donald Trump that’s unfolding in New York this week. Turns out that the former president (may he ever remain so) included a pre-taliation clause in the employment contract…
Read MoreA Record Pre-Taliation Sanction!
Hold everything, compliance officers. The Securities and Exchange Commission just dropped its biggest pre-taliation enforcement action ever, a $10 million punch to financial services firm D.E. Shaw for problematic language in employment agreements that the company used all the way into this year. The enforcement action, announced Friday, is far, far larger than any other…
Read MoreCBRE Busted on Pre-taliation Clauses
The Securities and Exchange Commission has sanctioned real estate giant CBRE for including pre-taliation clauses in employee severance agreements. This is the second pre-taliation enforcement action we’ve seen from the SEC in recent weeks, so apparently we have to review this nonsense yet again because it’s still a thing. Pre-taliation, as all compliance professionals should…
Read MoreSEC Dings Brinks on Pre-taliation
Just in time for Throwback Thursday, cash management company Brinks Co. has agreed to pay $400,000 to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission that its employment contracts included pre-taliation clauses — a whistleblower no-no that had been largely dormant since 2016. As outlined in a settlement order quietly announced this week, the SEC…
Read MoreIt’s Back! Pre-taliation Enforcement
Oh good lord. The Securities and Exchange Commission just dinged a financial services firm in New York $209,000 for including a “pre-taliation” clause in its employee manual, an eye-rolling offense against whistleblowers that I thought had gone extinct in 2016. Apparently not. The firm in question is Guggenheim Securities, the broker-dealer subsidiary of hedge fund…
Read MoreTrump Gets Subtle Pre-taliation Warning
All you compliance officers in the corporate world, spending all your time trying to protect whistleblowers and root out retaliation risks: take a gander at the challenge your federal government counterparts have under the Trump Administration. On Wednesday the Office of Special Counsel issued a reminder that any policies about communications from government employees—like, say, telling them…
Read MoreA Whistleblower Sanction Worth Your Attention
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…
Read MoreSEC Dings BlackRock for Pre-taliation Clauses
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…
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…
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