When this story publishes on Friday morning, I’ll be on my bike riding from Boston to Sturbridge for Day Zero of the Pan Mass Challenge. (I’m adding an extra day of cycling before the First and Second Day of the PMC.) Thanks to so many of you who read Compliance Building for your generous donations and kind words. I have my donor list and those kind words printed and tucked into the back pocket of my jersey. I’ll keep them with me over the 250+miles of cycling I have to complete this weekend.
If you have not contributed, there is still plenty of time to make a donation to fight cancer. I love seeing donation messages pop up while I’m riding. Donate here: http://pmc.org/egifts/DC0176
As for compliance-related matters, here are some of the stories that recently caught my attention.
SEC Whistleblower Award Sends Message to Government Employees by Samuel Rubenfeld in the Wall Street Journal
A $2.5 million award announced by the SEC last week didn’t include the name of the agency where the person worked, the company involved in the misconduct or the nature of the conduct involved, but lawyers representing tipsters and companies in whistleblower cases drew lessons from a footnote attached to the order. The footnote delineated who, among government employees, is eligible: Anyone who works for a local, state or federal agency, other than those at regulatory agencies or a law-enforcement organization. [More…]
Main Street and Premium Listings by Matt Levine
I think we are up to the Seventh Law of Insider Trading. The first six are: (1) don’t do it, (2) don’t do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on undisclosed merger targets, (3) don’t text or email about it, (4) don’t do it in your mother’s account, (5) don’t do it by planting bombs at a company and shorting its stock, and (6) don’t do it while employed at the Securities and Exchange Commission. I hereby declare the Seventh Law: (7) If you are going to insider trade, don’t Google “how to insider trade without getting caught” before or after you trade. [More…]
Mentoring Compliance Professionals by Roy Snell in the SCCE Blog
Call someone you know who could use a little mentoring. Call today. Call again in a week or two. Don’t wait for someone to match you up. It doesn’t work that way. Pick someone you would enjoy working with. Pick someone who is a “personality match.” Pick someone you think has potential. Pick someone you would be proud to say you helped. Ask them how they are doing. Think about what they need help with and send them an article or a link to a website. Tell them where you received your best compliance and ethics training. Encourage them to be involved in and hang out with the profession. Go onto social media and answer a few questions or make a comment about something you recently discovered. Write an article or blog post. Speak at a conference. Or better yet, invite your mentee to co-present or co-author a post or article. We don’t need much of your time. We just need a little bit of time from a lot of people. [More…]
More about Crime Coverage and Social Engineering Fraud b
Just days after a Southern District of New York judge ruled in the Medidata Solutions decision that the Computer Fraud section of a commercial crime policy covered losses from social engineering fraud (as I discussed in a post last week), a judge in the Eastern District of Michigan has held that a crime policy’s computer fraud section did not apply to social engineering fraud. [More…
The Ethics of Opposition Research by Hana Callaghan in the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics blog
Opposition research per se isn’t unethical, but there are boundaries. Starting with the premise that the goal of our political process is to create an informed electorate that can make educated choices come election day, we can assess whether those boundaries have been crossed. An ethically informed electorate requires that all information researched and used by a political campaign be true, fair, and relevant. [More…]
Was there a Housing Price Bubble? Revisited by Alex Tabarrok in Marginal Revolution
Let’s go back to the Shiller graph, now updated to 2017. Over the entire 20th century real home prices averaged an index value of about 110 (and were quite close to this value over the the entire 1950-1997 period). Over the entire 20th century, housing prices never once roce above 131, the 1989 peak. But beginning around 2000 house prices seemed to reach for an entirely new equilibrium. In fact, even given the financial crisis, prices since 2000 fell below the 20th century peak for only a few months in late 2011. Real prices today are now back to 2004 levels and rising. As I predicted in 2008, prices never returned to their long-run 20th century levels. [More…]
