Archive for 2019

Does compliance have a dark side?

Many years ago, the CEO of a client company told me that he wanted to fire another corporate officer there. I asked him what basis he had for this contemplated action and he said it was that the officer had failed to take mandatory compliance training. I responded by asking […]

Is ethics being short-changed by compliance?

In the beginning of this field there was ethics. But with the advent of the Sentencing Guidelines in 1991 compliance entered the picture and where there were once ethics programs now stand “compliance and ethics” ones. Has ethics been short-changed in this transition? In a recent posting in the Harvard […]

Sweating the small stuff

In Behavioral Ethics as Compliance  (Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Van Rooij & Sokol Eds)) Yuval Feldman and Yotam Kaplan write: “[C]urrent approaches to law enforcement and compliance tend to focus on “smoking guns” and extreme violations of the law as the core case and as the ultimate manifestation of the […]

Does ethics training actually affect business conduct?

In “Can Ethics be Taught? Evidence from Securities Exams and Investment Adviser Misconduct,” forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics,  Zachary T Kowaleski of University of Notre Dame, Andrew Sutherland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Felix Vetter of the London School of Economics “study the consequences of a […]

Conflicts of interest and nonprofit organizations

The settlement by President Trump of a lawsuit brought by the NY Attorney General claiming that the Trump Foundation misused funds to benefit his 2016 campaign was attention getting not only because of who was involved in the case but also because he was compelled to pay $2 million to […]

Behavioral ethics, the board and C&E officers

In Conflicts and Biases in the Boardroom, recently posted on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Frank Glassner, of Veritas identifies five ways that cognitive bias can inhibit great governance: – A board is reluctant to ask the right questions – The group is unable […]

Strengthening your C&E program through behavioral ethics

A new post in the FCPA Blog. I hope you find it useful.

More on conflicts of interest disclosure

“Culture trumps compliance,” the old saying goes. But it still worth being reminded of it, particularly in the conflict of interest area, where the effect of culture may be less manifest than it is for various other types of misconduct (like harassment). The latest contribution to this body of knowledge […]

Expanding Compliance Liability for Directors?

A post a few weeks ago discussed the issuance of an important recent judicial decision in Delaware regarding board liability for compliance failures, and specifically the fact that the claim against the directors had survived a motion to dismiss.  Given how few decisions  support claims such as this – what are […]

The big compliance news of 2019

In my latest column in Compliance & Ethics Professional I discuss the Department of Justice’s new policy of rewarding antitrust compliance programs. I hope you find it interesting.