Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
If your marketing materials say that you have “never, not once, taken even so much as a nickel” from potential referrals, you have to put that policy in place and enforce it. Jeffery Slocum & Associates told is clients this. Then some of its employees accepted golf tickets. The Securities and Exchange Commission is pretty … Read more »
On Friday, Hewlett-Packard fired its CEO because he violated the company’s code of conduct. Mark Hurd had submitted inaccurate expense reports. That sounds like a good message from the Board. Anyone can be fired for violating the code. However, Mr. Hurd was given a severance package that may be worth more than $35 million, including … Read more »
Sort of. The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Ontario v. Quon regarding a police chief reviewing the content of a police officer’s text messages with consent or a warrant. Many commenters hoped that the Court would issue a broad statement on an employee’s privacy rights in this age of cloud computing and web 2.0. … Read more »
It’s always useful to look at what your competition is doing. The same is true in drafting your code of conduct (or code of ethics or whatever name you chose). It is useful to look at you what your competitors’ codes of conduct look like. Since Sarbanes-Oxley requires a public company to have a code … Read more »
Cleary Gottlieb put together a useful Alert Memo on The New Rules of the Game under the New York Public Pension Fund Reform Code of Conduct (.pdf) They outline the key provisions of the Reform Code and suggest action steps for investment firms that do business (or seek to do business) with New York Public … Read more »
In a widely publicized story, The Carlyle Group has agreed to adopt New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Public Pension Fund Reform Code of Conduct. It is the first money manager to adopt Cuomo’s new “code of reform” for the municipal-pension market. (Carlyle executives will not be subject to any criminal liability under the settlement … Read more »
In the world of compliance, you may sometimes wonder if that code of ethics really works. Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman presented their research that a code of ethics really can reduce bad behavior: Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting. Their studies provided evidence that morality … Read more »
In drafting and updating my code of conduct and ethics it is always useful to see what other companies are doing. I look for both approach, content and style. For instance, I collected the Whistleblower Hotlines for Home Builders. It is great to see a comparison of a group of compliance codes. KPMG put together … Read more »
Rebecca Walker of Kaplan & Walker LLP is the author of a report on A Benchmarking Survey on Third-Party Codes of Conduct (register to download) sponsored by The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. The SCCE received survey results from more than 400 compliance professionals on how they deal with third-party compliance policies. As Rebecca … Read more »
For a change of pace, I thought I would look at the codes of conduct for educational institutions for their take on the issues. Boston University has an easy to find page with the President’s Statement of Commitment to Ethical Conduct with a link to the BU’s Code of Ethical Conduct. Boston University is committed … Read more »