I am attending the Global Ethics Summit 2010, hosted by Dow Jones and Ethisphere. Here are my notes, live from this session: “New challenges abound amid advancing best practices, not to mention the continually escalating rate of enforcement both by U.S. regulators and overseas officials. What’s on the horizon for compliance? This roundtable discussion comprised … Read more »
Global Ethics Summit 2010
Today I will be in New York attending the Global Ethics Summit 2010, hosted by Dow Jones and Ethisphere. Assuming I can get an internet connection and power, I will be live-blogging from the summit. If not live, I will try to get my notes published later tonight on the train ride home. Here is … Read more »
Hiring Lawyers for Employees Under Investigation
Your company comes under investigation and specific employees are implicated. What is the right way to get lawyers for those employees? Assuming the company is picking up the cost of the lawyers, the company usually wants to have some input on the selection. A recent New Jersey case highlighted some of the issues involved for … Read more »
Compliance Bits and Pieces for February 19
Here are some interesting compliance related stories from the past two weeks. (I reserved last week for my blogoversary.) Details Emerge on SEC Office of Market Intelligence by Bruce Carton in Compliance Week One of the first tools that the Securities Exchange Commission launched after it ushered itself into the Internet era in the mid-1990s … Read more »
New York City Enacts New Rules for Its Pension Fund Investments
New York City Comptroller John C. Liu announced sweeping changes in the way New York City pension funds make investment decisions. Following the lead of New York state and several other states, New York City is changing how it deals with gifts, campaign contributions and placement agents. Ban on Campaign Contributions Comptroller Liu declines any … Read more »
Securities Class Actions in Canada
With the winter Olympics going full swing in Canada, I thought I would look to how that country is dealing with securities class actions. NERA Economic Consulting just released their 2009 Update on Trends in Canadian Securities Class Actions. Some tidbits: Eight securities class actions were filed in 2009, compared with the 10 filings in … Read more »
Media Leak is not Protected as a SOX Whistleblower
Leaking information to the media about bad financial controls is not protected by SOX whistleblower retaliation clause. Nicholas P. Tides and Matthew C. Neumann were working as “Audit IT SOX auditors” at The Boeing Company. They made several complaints about auditing deficiencies to their supervisors. They claimed “that Boeing’s auditing culture was unethical and that … Read more »
The Economist: Special Report on Financial Risk
This week’s The Economist has an excellent special report: The Gods Strike Back. The title comes from Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that … Read more »
President’s Day
Washington’s Birthday, the federal holiday was originally implemented by the United States Congress in 1880 for government offices in the District of Columbia (20 Stat. 277) and expanded in 1885 to include all federal offices (23 Stat. 516). As the first federal holiday to honor an American citizen, the holiday was celebrated on Washington’s actual … Read more »
Weekend Book Review: In Fed We Trust
It is only fitting that I am writing this book review on a Sunday. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic starts off by telling about the importance of a few Sundays in 2008. In March, there was the Sunday when the Federal Reserve announced an unprecedented action to lend $30 … Read more »