These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.
White softens stance on minor securities violations by Mark Schoeff Jr. in Investment News
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Jo White told compliance officers Tuesday that the agency will work with them to address regulatory lapses before resorting to enforcement.
“The balance is critical,” Ms. White told a meeting of the National Society of Compliance Professionals in Washington. “We’re not seeking for every minor violation to bring an enforcement action by any means. It’s not a game of gotcha at all.”
In Praise of Electronically Monitoring Employees by Andrew McAfee in Harvard Business Review
We got to observe what happened at 392 locations across five chains (all of them sit-down places like Applebee’s or Chili’s, although neither of these were part of the research) both before and after they started using Restaurant Guard, a new piece of theft-detection software from NCR. NCR supplied us with the data but did not support the research in any other way. The data covered almost two years and 39 of the 50 states.
Is There a Glass Ceiling in Corporate Crime? in Freakonomics
Our podcast “Women Are Not Men” looked at a variety of gender gaps, including the fact that the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men. A new paper by Darrell J. Steffensmeier, Jennifer Schwartz, and Michael Roche in the American Sociological Review finds that women are less likely to be involved in corporate crime as well.
The Tuck Rule, the Push Rule and Retaliation Against Whistleblowers by Tom Fox
In thinking about that play and the Patriots loss to the Jets, I considered the following: is it now the beginning of the end of the Patriots dynasty which started on an equally obscure rule and penalty, aka “The Tuck Rule”? In the play during a 2001 playoff game, Raiders’ cornerback Charles Woodson sacked Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, which in turn, caused a fumble that was eventually recovered by Raiders’ linebacker Greg Biekert, and would have almost certainly sealed the game. Officials reviewed the play and eventually determined that Brady’s arm was moving forward, when it was actually moving backwards, thus making it an incomplete pass. Got it?
