These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.
Compliance Leadership and “The Grey Area” by Roy Snell in SCCE’s The Compliance & Ethics Blog
When people sit in a room, especially under stress, after finding a potential problem, they tend to try to broaden the definition of the law rather than narrow it. The problem is that they should have probably tried to narrow the grey areas of the law rather than broaden them. They should have talked about the spirit of the law to help narrow the definition. They should discuss what it would look like in the local newspaper to narrow it. They should talk about their principles and ethical culture to try to narrow it.
SEC’s Ceresney: Common FCPA Violations in Pharma Industry by Jaclyn Jaeger in Compliance Week
In remarks this week at CBI’s Annual Pharmaceutical Compliance Congress in Washington D.C., SEC Director of Enforcement Andrew Ceresney highlighted three types of misconduct that most often arise in the pharmaceutical industry concerning violations of the Foreign Corruption Practices Act.
The Parameters of the Attorney/Client Privilege and Grinding it out with Anthony Mason by Tom Fox in the FCPA Compliance and Ethics Blog
Just as Mason did the hard work in Riley’s grind-it-out offense; for the attorney/client privilege to be of use to you, certain hard work must be done to establish the attorney/client privilege in the corporate context. The five prongs listed by Keltner must be fulfilled for the privilege to apply. Simply having a chat with your lawyer or even the company’s lawyer will not invoke the privilege or protect you.
Regulating the Underground: Secret Supper Clubs, Pop-Up Restaurants, and the Role of Law by Sarah Schindler in the CLS Blue Sky Blog
As manifestations of the so-called sharing economy become more common in more municipalities, local governments must consider how to handle their emergence. The goal should be devising a regulatory scheme that is easy and inexpensive enough to ensure that these creative additions to the local economy will be able to operate, but that is also protective of public health and safety.
Fed Stress Tests Find Banks Adequately Capitalized by Ryan Tracy and Victoria McGrane in the Wall Street Journal
The largest U.S.-based banks are strong enough to keep lending during a severe recession, the Federal Reserve said Thursday, a sign many banks will soon get permission to return profits to investors by raising dividends or buying back shares.
Regulatory Rollback Unlikely Despite Gallagher by Ben Dipietro in WSJ.com’s Risk & Compliance Journal
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Daniel Gallagher issued a statement this week saying the accumulated effect of regulations on the financial services industry since the Dodd-Frank Act was passed have amounted to “death by a thousand cuts.” As Mr. Gallagher put it: “No regulator, as far as I know, has considered the overall regulatory burden on financial services firms when determining whether to impose additional costly regulations,” adding regulators are like “the proverbial ostrich–head firmly entrenched in the sand” when it comes to understanding how these rules divert capital from creating real economic growth. Attorneys who track SEC issues say the comments reflect the sentiments of the big banks but doubt they’ll lead to a reduction in the number and scope of such rules.