Compliance Bricks and Mortar for May 1

These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.

Wall Street Pushes Back on Foreign Bribery Probe by Jean Eaglesham, Emily Glazer Ned Levin in the Wall Street Journal

The previously unreported campaign by banks goes to the heart of a wide-ranging inquiry into whether they ran afoul of U.S. antibribery laws by giving jobs to relatives of managers of state-owned companies and other well-connected officials, including the kin of high-ranking Chinese government officials known as “princelings,” allegedly to curry favor in getting deals.

Documenting Your Compliance Program by Michael Volkov in Corruption, Crime & Compliance

First, a compliance record is valuable to a company’s compliance team as a reference to specific actions taken by compliance professionals and business. It is a vital internal control that provides information needed to measure, audit and manage a compliance program.

Selerity Strikes Gold with Early Look at Twitter Earnings Release by Bruce Carton in Compliance Week

According to Mashable, Selerity did not simply stumble upon the earnings release. Although the the company that handles Twitter’s investor relations page did publish the page early, the link to that page was not publicly known or available. Selerity knew, however, that

The URL scheme Twitter used was “https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=XXXXXX.” The last published news release had the ID number of “905554.”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Navigating Document Privilege Disputes (.pdf) with the SEC by Michael J. Rivera and Maggie T. Grace in Wall Street Lawyer

The unfortunate reality in situations such as this is that the SEC is able to file court papers disclosing details about its otherwise non-public investigations. This provides the SEC with leverage in disputes with companies over privilege assertions (and over other document production disputes) and presents companies with a difficult dilemma when the SEC threatens to litigate over a company’s privilege assertions. While a company ultimately might prevail in court on some or all of its challenged privilege assertions, it could suffer prolonged reputational harm from the statements and allegations made in the SEC’s court filings. Moreover, the information in such filings could pique the interest of the plaintiffs’ bar.

Lastly, an eyeopening chart on the support for gay marriage in the United States. Today, the least gay-friendly state, Alabama, is about where today’s most gay-friendly state, Vermont, was a decade ago.
Data is from the Williams Institute: Trends in Public Support for Marriage for Same-sex Couples by State