All We Need Is Trust :)
It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.
A corporate “crisis” happens and supposed compliance “commentators / gurus” or those with fancy self-made titles or institutional affiliations come out of the woodwork with the supposed secret sauce like “doing compliance,” “tone at the top,” “values-based culture” and my favorite “trust.”
Indeed, “Trust Your Employees, Not Your Rule Book,” was the title of this recent article in the Harvard Business Review.
FCPA Flash – A Conversation With Ryan McConnell Regarding FCPA Compliance
The FCPA Flash podcast provides in an audio format the same fresh, candid, and informed commentary about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and related topics as readers have come to expect from written posts on FCPA Professor.
This FCPA Flash podcast episode is a conversation with Ryan McConnell (founder of the boutique Houston law firm R. McConnell Group). McConnell recently authored an article titled “Watching Which Way the Wind Blows: You Need Good Forecasting to Build Good Compliance,” and in the podcast he discusses: (i) how many company risk assessments are fundamentally flawed; (ii) how best to forecast FCPA risk; (iii) and whether the DOJ and SEC’s approach to enforcing the FCPA is fair to certain companies.
FCPA Flash is sponsored by Kroll. Kroll is trusted by companies and compliance officers worldwide to help prevent, detect, and remediate FCPA challenges with scalable, end-to-end compliance solutions: from high-volume third party screening and automated monitoring, to risk-based due diligence, to complex investigations and monitorships.
Wal-Mart’s Recent Disclosures
Last week, Wal-Mart made several disclosures that touched upon its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act scrutiny and compliance enhancements. The materials were released in advance of Wal-Mart’s June 2nd annual meeting.
This post highlights FCPA and related information in Wal-Mart’s Annual Report, Proxy Statement, and Global Ethics and Compliance Report. The later will be of interest to compliance practitioners.
In short, regardless of what may (or may not) have happened at Wal-Mart approximately 5-10 years ago, it is clear that Wal-Mart has become an industry-leader in FCPA compliance best practices. Anyone who fails to acknowledge this is simply not credible.
Friday Roundup
FCPA sentence, scrutiny alerts and updates, flummoxed, lots of time to watch film, and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday roundup.
FCPA Sentence
This December 2016 post highlighted the DOJ’s announcement of FCPA conspiracy charges and plea agreements against four individuals (Daniel Perez, Kamta Ramnarine, Victor Valdez, and Douglas Ray) associated with Hunt Pan Am Aviation in connection with a Mexican bribery scheme.
Perez and Ramnarine were both previously sentenced to three years probation and Valdez was sentenced to 1 year and a day in federal prison, 2 years of supervised release, and ordered to pay approximately $91,000 in restitution.
Yesterday, Ray was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison, 3 years of supervised release, and ordered to pay approximately $590,000 in restitution.
Delaware Court Once Again Rejects “The Conclusory Allegation That Because Illegal Behavior Occurred, Internal Controls Must Have Been Deficient, And The Board Must Have Known So”
In my non-FCPA life, I teach a variety of courses such as corporations and securities regulation.
Because of this, I continue to scratch my head as to the seeming inability of certain FCPA commentators to grasp certain basic aspects of the legal framework regarding corporate law and governance.
For instance, this recent post is titled “When Will Shareholders Force Boards to Do Compliance” and the commentator asserts: “[with] any of the companies which were embroiled in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) matters which recently settled, where was the Board when the company was busy paying out millions in bribes, in some cases literally across the globe?”