Tag: Newspaper rule

The Newspaper Rule and a Massachusetts Politician

One of the classic statements in a compliance program is “don’t do something if you would be embarrassed to see a story about it on the front page of the newspaper.” Just because something is legal, it does not mean it’s ethical or a good thing to do.

A recent example popped up in Massachusetts politics involving Middlesex County Sheriff James V. DiPaola. (I just voted for him in November.) He was planning to retire, even though he had just been re-elected. Retire, but continue working as the Sheriff.

It turns out there is an exception in the Massachusetts Pension Law that allows retirees to run for paid elective office without losing their pensions.

DiPaola was a Malden police officer for 18 years before being elected a state representative in 1992. He then became Middlesex sheriff in a 1996 and was re-elected three times (including 2010). If he had kept working his pension would have remained mostly flat, since he has enough years of service to receive the maximum benefit allowed.

It turns out, if he retired before the election and didn’t collect his salary for the rest of 2010, he could collect his pension and receive his salary as Sheriff. A legal, but ethically troubling position.

Instead, he did the right thing.

“I’d always be remembered for this, for double-dipping, that that would be my legacy,’’ … crediting a Globe reporter’s question for his spark of conscience. “From a financial perspective it was great. It was legal. But I tossed and turned all night. I did put myself first this time, and I don’t want it to end that way.’’

In part his decision was forced by reporter from the Boston Globe. Sean Murphy had confronted DiPaola. With the real threat of having his action end up on the front page of the newspaper, DiPaola changed his mind.

Unfortunately, the revelation ended tragically when DiPaola died from apparent suicide this past weekend.

Sources:

Email Etiquette and Compliance

Lots of hallway conversations have turned into email and instant messaging conversations. There are lots of problems with that.

First, is just the lack of human interaction. Humans are social and need to meet face-to-face. Along with that is the limited ability to add tone, sarcasm and other elements of conversation into the written word.

The second problem is that ability to retrieve that email or instant message conversation in a way that you cannot with a hallway conversation. This is a records management and compliance problem.

An example of an embarrassing and damaging IM conversation came out on Capitol Hill today. According to the New York Times (Rating Agencies Draw Fire on Capitol Hill) Congressman John A. Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky, read aloud from an instant-message conversation between two S&P employees in the firm’s structured product division:

Official 1: By the way, that deal is ridiculous

Official 2: I know, right. The model definitely doesn’t capture half the risk.

Official 1: We should not be rating it

Official 2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it

Official 1: There is a lot of risk associated with it. I personally don’t feel comfy signing off as a committee member.

That may have been a funny hallway conversation, but is not getting the company in lots of trouble.

Before you send that email or IM, ask yourself how you would feel if your Congressman was reading it into testimony and having it appear in the New York Times.