Here are some interesting compliance stories from the past week:
Chief Compliance Officers, SEC-style by Matt Kelly in Compliance Week‘s The Big Picture
Griffin is the SEC’s first-ever chief compliance officer, and her arrival is long overdue. It stems from news that broke last May of an insider-trading scandal within the SEC, which is pretty scandalous considering these are the folks who enforce laws against insider trading at public companies. The SEC’s inspector general published a report painting an ugly picture of SEC compliance efforts, which boiled down to this: “The Commission lacks any true compliance system to monitor employees’ securities transactions.” The report suggested that perhaps the SEC should, you know, have one, and put a single executive in charge of it.
SEC’s new adviser exam schedule: ‘We simply show up’ by Jed Horowitz in Investment News
The SEC has indefinitely dropped its goal of inspecting some 11,000 registered investment advisers on a regular schedule, and is instead focusing its examination resources on advisers who are the subject of tips and complaints, an official said. “We simply show up, because if there are allegations of wrongdoing we don’t want to give firms a good deal of lead time to clean up,” Gene Gohlke, associate director of the SEC’s Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examination said at a Practising Law Institute investment management conference on Friday.
Electronic Systems Policy After ‘Stengart’ by Kristin Sostowski in the New Jersey Law Journal
The Stengart decision obviously has serious implications both for companies that seek to limit and monitor employees’ use of company computers and for attorneys who discover arguably privileged communications between an employee and the employee’s lawyer on a company’s computer systems. In the wake of the Stengart decision, New Jersey employers should re-examine their current electronic systems policies and e-discovery practices in collaboration with employment counsel, keeping in mind the following best practices….
XBRL U.S. Shows Common Errors, Checks Consistency by Melissa Klein Aguilar in Compliance Week‘s The Filing Cabinet
Information that might be of interest for those public companies preparing to comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s XRBL mandate for the first time: A new white paper detailing some of the most common errors companies make related to XBRL U.S. GAAP Taxonomy rules.