Since I work in Boston and my office is next to the Black Rose, it’s hard to ignore St. Patrick’s Day. And yes, the Black Rose was already full of drinking patrons at 9:00 am. Getting past all the Irish cheer, these are some of the compliance related stories that recently caught my attention.
Super Hedge Fund by Sharon Hannes in Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
Activist hedge funds revolutionized corporate America and generated both excitement and criticism alike. This article suggests that a novel market mechanism, a “super hedge fund,” would maintain the benefits of hedge fund activism, while curbing its downsides. The super hedge fund would not really be a fund but, rather, a contractual arrangement among a broad group of institutional investors and a task force of financial experts. The task force would pool together the potency of the institutional shareholders in a sophisticated manner and then unleash its sting on target corporations. [More…]
Besides greed, what motivates insider traders? by Andrew Snyder
Insider trading is strikingly similar to espionage: stealing information for personal gain or spying for the benefit of another entity. The magnitude of a tipper passing confidential company information and a government insider such as Edward Snowden who hands over national classified secrets are incomparable, but what’s similar is who’s doing the lying, cheating, stealing and why they’re doing it. [More…]
“And” Or “Or” – This Ninth Circuit Opinion Highlights The Difference by Keith Paul Bishop in California Corporate Securities Law
“And” and “or” are classified as conjunctions. They are classified as such because they yoke together words, phrases, clauses and sometimes even sentences. They are not interchangeable, however, as illustrated by the recent opinion by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Zetwick v. County of Yolo, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 3260 (9th Cir. Cal. Feb. 23, 2017). [More…]
Connecting Fraud, Pressure, and Culture by Matt Kelly in Radical Compliance
My theme was fitting the fraud triangle to your organization’s risks—and as sometimes happens, I stumbled into an insight while speaking that was so useful, I wanted to share here.
First, let’s remember the fraud triangle itself. That’s the device auditors use to help think about how fraud might strike an organization. It has three legs: rationalization, opportunity, and pressure.
My contention is that for each leg of the fraud triangle, an opposite force exists.
[More…]
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