Posts Tagged ‘whistleblowers’
SEC Reforms Whistleblower Reforms
The Securities and Exchange Commission quietly voted last week to expand the ways that whistleblowers might win awards for reporting misconduct to regulators, and reversed previous rule changes from the Trump Administration that capped especially large awards. Neither development is a surprise, nor should they be particularly disruptive to the internal reporting programs that corporate…
Read MoreTwitter Allegations: Begin at the Top
Corporate compliance and audit professionals might want to clear your schedules. The former head of security for Twitter has published a stunning whistleblower complaint against the company, alleging all manner of security failures at the social media giant — and that management then lied to the board and regulators about the severity of the problems. …
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 MoreTips on Whistleblower Tips
I had the good fortune this week to attend a panel discussion on the latest developments in whistleblower tips and SEC enforcement. Given how often whistleblower tips turn into big, complicated headaches for corporate compliance officers, let me pass along some insightful morsels from the speakers. The panel was part of the day-long Securities Enforcement…
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 MoreThe Deeper Meaning in the Facebook Scandal
This week I’ve kept one semi-interested eye on Frances Haugen, more commonly known as the Facebook whistleblower. Her bombshells launched — the 60 Minutes interview, the testimony before Congress, the leaked documents — were all devastating to Facebook, but compliance professionals should look deeper. Haugen’s arrival on the scene portends something deeper, too. By now…
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 MoreA Thought on Whistleblower Programs
Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission doled out a $50 million whistleblower award, the second-largest award given in the award program’s 10-year history. The money, however, isn’t the telling detail in this case. The telling detail is that the award went to two whistleblowers, who worked together to bring a misconduct case to the…
Read MoreDoJ Dinged on Whistleblower Protection
Radical Compliance is never one to engage in schadenfreude, but for whatever this may be worth: the Justice Department has been dinged by its own inspector general for sloppy whistleblower protection efforts with its third parties. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, sent a memo to senior Justice Department officials last week warning that the department…
Read MoreAML Reform and Whistleblowers
I try to be as cynical as possible about Congress, but this week may be one of those rare times when lawmakers actually do something intelligent. They’re poised to overhaul the nation’s anti-money laundering laws in a dramatic way, with a potentially huge gift to compliance officers to boot. That overhaul is the Anti-Money Laundering…
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