Here are some recent compliance-related stories that I found interesting:
The face of the financial crisis by Larry Ribstein in the Creative Destroyer
We need somebody we can send off to jail. Jail apparently provides the moral clarity necessary to wrap up a financial crisis. Bernie Madoff’s just an old-fashioned fraud from another era. The Justice Department has sent almost 3,000 people to jail for financial fraud between October, 2009 and June 2010, but no faces.
House Passes Impotent Debarment Bill by Mike Koehler in FCPA Professor
On September 15th, the House, by a unanimous 409-0 vote, passed H.R. 5366 (“Overseas Contractor Reform Act”) (see here). The Act generally provides that a corporation “found to be in violation of the [FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions] shall be proposed for debarment from any contract or grant awarded by the Federal Government within 30 days after a final judgment of such a violation.” The Act’s key trigger term for debarment – “found to be in violation” of the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions – is a trigger that is not reached in nearly every FCPA enforcement action because of the façade of FCPA enforcement. Thus, the Act represents impotent legislation.
Small Change – Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker
Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
After Dodd-Frank, SEC Getting At Least One FCPA Tip A Day in WSJ.com’s Corruption Currents
The Securities and Exchange Commission has been receiving at least one tip a day about potential foreign bribery violations since a whistleblower bounty program became law in July, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A Tale of Two Strategies for SOX Compliance by Matt Kelly in Compliance Week‘s the Big Picture
Only that elite group can manage the responsibility of working with public investors—people so far removed from the corporation itself, that they have no choice but to trust in the accuracy of financial statements. SOX is one measure this country uses to determine which corporations belong in that group, and which don’t. Alloy Steel and Facebook both said today that they don’t, and they deserve praise for it. This is how the system is supposed to work.
Image of Bits & Pieces is By Thunderchild7.
