Sarbanes-Oxley Act | The FCPA Blog

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Posts Tagged: Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Board-level ‘risk committees’ are great, unless they destroy the company

Richard L. Cassin May 18, 2023

An alarming aspect of the March meltdown that took out Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank is that each had a stand-alone risk committee. We need to know what went wrong because risk committees are now commonly found at “most large companies,” according to a Big Four audit partner I talked to, and are assumed to protect against imprudent governance and management.… Continue Reading

That’s surprising. Most audit committees can still do their job

Richard L. Cassin March 30, 2023

How do public company audit committees cope? Their to-do list keeps getting longer and more complicated. Yet somehow, most audit committees still complete their tasks (which, by the way, include FCPA compliance oversight).… Continue Reading

Why FCPA cover-ups are worse than the crime

Richard L. Cassin June 24, 2021

Every compliance training session should include this warning: If you ever become involved with, see, or otherwise discover a potential FCPA violation, stop everything. Don’t clean your desk, empty the trash can, or clear your browser history.… Continue Reading

Is compliance a young person’s profession?

Richard L. Cassin March 11, 2021

Although we all celebrate birthdays and keep close track of our age, you can’t do that in the workplace anymore. So there’s no reliable information out there about the average age of compliance officers.… Continue Reading

What did WeWork teach us about ‘private-company’ compliance?

Erica Salmon Byrne November 13, 2019

As the leader of a private company, WeWork’s former CEO Adam Neumann clearly wasn’t subject to strong expense reporting requirements or conflicts of interest processes — he threw extravagant parties, routinely hired his family members and close friends, and engaged in numerous related-party transactions.… Continue Reading

Azish Filabi: Supreme Court should protect internal whistleblowers

Azish Filabi November 17, 2017

On November 28, 2017, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Digital Realty Trust v. Paul Somers on the question of whether the whistleblower protections of the Dodd-Frank Act extend to internal whistleblowers, or only to those who report to the SEC.… Continue Reading

Bitkower and Bartholomew: Supreme Court to consider dueling definitions of ‘whistleblower’

David Bitkower and Christian R. Bartholomew August 9, 2017

The whistleblower provisions of Dodd-Frank have been beset with interpretive difficulties, in part because of uncertainty regarding Dodd-Frank’s relationship to the whistleblower protections of the earlier Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

These difficulties have raised questions about which categories of whistleblowers are entitled to protection and what protections they are entitled to receive. … Continue Reading

Arturo del Castillo: What we learned (and what we forgot) about Enron

Arturo del Castillo August 2, 2017

On December 2, 2001, the world woke up with shocking news: Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Thus began one of the most important corporate fraud scandals in the history of capitalism.… Continue Reading

FCPA whistleblower: Former Bio-Rad GC awarded $10 million for retaliatory firing

Richard L. Cassin February 7, 2017

A federal jury in San Francisco took just three hours Monday to decide that Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. retaliated against former general counsel Sanford “Sandy” Wadler for reporting FCPA violations.

The jury awarded Wadler $2.9 million in back pay and stock compensation and $5 million for punitive damages.… Continue Reading

SEC brings its first stand-alone whistleblower retaliation action

Alexis Ronickher October 6, 2016

The SEC last week brought its first enforcement action based solely on retaliation against a whistleblower. Casino-gaming company International Gaming Technology (IGT) agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty to settle the SEC’s enforcement action.… Continue Reading

Are FCPA books and records and internal controls defenses becoming obsolete?

Thomas Fox March 9, 2015

Many of us scratched our head in 2010 when the Oracle FCPA enforcement action came out. We didn’t understand how a company could be prosecuted, even civilly by the SEC for internal controls or book and records violations, without evidence that bribes had been paid.… Continue Reading

CEO and CFO charged with SOX violations for hiding internal controls problems

Richard L. Cassin August 7, 2014

The SEC last week charged two officers of a now bankrupt computer equipment company with misrepresenting the state of its internal controls over financial reporting.

The CEO of Florida-based QSGI Inc.,… Continue Reading