These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.
What can we learn from employee reimbursement program disasters? by Julie DiMauro
Boston-based mutual fund company Fidelity fired or let resign about 200 people during the past year after discovering that some employees misused the firm’s partial-reimbursement program, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the matter. [More…]
The Irrepressible Myth That SEC Overregulation Has Chilled IPOs by John C. Coffee, Jr.
If high regulatory costs and SEC overregulation were a cause of low and decreasing IPO volume, this would be a uniquely American problem. But it is not. IPO volume has declined even more dramatically in Canada and has declined on a level comparable to the U.S. in Europe and Japan. Because Canada has no national securities regulator, the decline of IPOs in Canada cannot be blamed on an overregulating national regulator. [More…]
Whistleblowing Hotlines: A Gray Area Under EU’s New Privacy Law by Henry Cutter
“The ambiguity is there,” said Vera Cherepanova, a compliance consultant based in Milan who wrote a paper for the FCPA Blog on how GDPR will affect the whistleblowing process. “For compliance officers, the problem is that we are not the center. We are not the key concept of the GDPR and basically no one is issuing any official information for us.” [More…]
A View From Virginia: Is It Ethical for Lawyers to Accept Bitcoins and Other Cryptocurrencies? by Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek & Jim McCauley
Nebraska is the only state we are aware of that has issued an ethical opinion specifically for Bitcoin usage. Nebraska’s opinion states that lawyers may accept payments in digital currencies, but must immediately convert them into U.S. dollars. Any refund of monies is also made in U.S. dollars and not in digital currency. [More…]