Jkaplan


The full promise of compliance programs

My most recent column in Compliance & Ethics Professional http://bit.ly/3Y6Ao66

A terrific alliance in the C&E space

Yesterday Kaplan & Walker LLP sent out this notice to friends and colleagues: Happy New Year! We are writing to let you know some very exciting news. Our friend and fellow compliance lawyer Amii Barnard-Bahn is joining Kaplan & Walker LLP as a new partner! Amii is an extremely capable and well-respected […]

Waiving conflicts of interest: whether, when, how

A well-trod hypothetical case. The head of a company’s regional office is putting on a reception for its customers. She believes that the best vendor (in terms of price and quality) is a caterer owned by her brother. Would it be a conflict of interest (“COI”) to give him the […]

Conflict of interest program assessments

Compliance program assessments come in all shapes and sizes.   For some – but not all – organizations it may make considerable sense to conduct a general program assessment.  For others targeted deep dive/program assessments may be more appropriate – particularly in the area of conflict of interest (“COI”). What does […]

Compliance Incentives, Risk Assessment and Moral Hazard

Compliance Incentives, Risk Assessment and Moral Hazard “Moral hazard” exists where there is a misalignment of incentives between those with a capacity to create risks and those likely to bear the costs of such risks. This is a broad concept and should not be limited to compliance and ethics (C&E). […]

2023 behavioral ethics and compliance index

2023 behavioral ethics and compliance index While in the more than ten years of its existence the COI Blog has been devoted primarily to examining conflicts of interest it has also run quite a few posts on what behavioral ethics might mean for corporate compliance and ethics programs. Below is an updated version of a […]

Mitigating Project Risks – The Under-Discovered Country

Not all organizations have significant project-based compliance and ethics risks. But not all organizations that do  have  such risks have implemented sufficient mitigation measures in this regard. The place to start is with a risk assessment, by which I mean: – An overall assessment of projects, i.e., what are the […]

Hiring ethical employees

In A Behavioural Economics Perspective on Compliance  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3929624  Sheheryar Banuri (of the University of East Anglia) “reviews the behavioural economics perspective on compliance with rules (broadly) and with whistle-blowing and antitrust compliance (more specifically) culminating in a series of recommendations for organizations seeking to improve employee compliance and detection of […]

Behavioral ethics: expanding notions of risk

In Behavioral Ethics Perspective on the Theory of Criminal Law & Punishment Hadar Dancig Rosenberg and Yuval Feldman of Bar-Ilan University identify ways in which behavioral ethics ideas and information can inform an understanding of risk. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4222232   While addressed to the realm of criminal law they are applicable to the […]

Ethics Slobs: the opposite of “ethics champions”

In a recent post I noted that “the various investigations into President Trump and members of his administration and others have focused attention on an age-old debate whether careless wrongdoing is as reprehensible as is the intentional sort.” The answer is, I believe, yes. I further noted that “I do […]