BNY Mellon and Lessons Learned In Hiring Family Members – Part II

In yesterday’s post I reviewed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement action involving the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BNY Mellon) around its hiring of sons and nephews of foreign governmental officials to obtain or retain business from certain foreign Sovereign Wealth Funds. I discussed the underlying facts and penalties assessed against BNY Mellon as laid out in the SEC Cease and Desist Order (the “Order”). Today I want to provide some guidance on what this enforcement action may mean for companies going forward when hiring the sons and daughters or close family relatives of foreign government officials.

The first thing to remember is there is nothing in the FCPA which prohibits the hiring of a son, daughter or close family member of a foreign government official. What the FCPA does make illegal is an action where a company “or any officer, director, employee, or agent acting on behalf of such issuer, in order to obtain or retain business, from corruptly giving or authorizing the giving of, anything of value to any foreign official for the purposes of influencing the official or inducing the official to act in violation of his or her lawful duties, or to secure any improper advantage, or to induce a foreign official to use his influence with a foreign governmental instrumentality to influence any act or decision of such government or instrumentality.” [citation omitted]

The actions of BNY Mellon were clearly designed to not simply curry favor with the foreign governmental officials involved but also to either grow the business or help to retain what the company already had in place with the un-named foreign Sovereign Wealth Fund. At this point most companies have a written FCPA compliance program in place; consisting of policies and procedures. Note, this does not mean that the compliance program is effective because for a compliance program to be effective, a company must actually be doing compliance. Many FCPA enforcement actions occur because an exception was granted to a policy or procedure and either the reason for granting the exception was inappropriate or there was no documentation as to why the exception was granted. In the case of BNY Mellon, it was the latter.

BNY Mellon offered high value, high prestige summer internship programs for “undergraduates as well as a separate summer program for postgraduates actively pursuing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) or similar degree. Admission to the BNY Mellon postgraduate internship program was highly competitive and characterized by stringent hiring standards.” The main purpose of these internships was to give BNY Mellon an opportunity to evaluate the interns as potential permanent hires to the company. There was a designated track for nomination to the internship program and internal company evaluation prior to offering candidates an intern position. In other words, there were policies and procedures around the process but BNY Mellon did not follow them.

Hiring Process

The first Red Flag, which BNY Mellon seemingly ignored in this entire process, was that each of the candidates were recommended to the firm by foreign governmental officials who held control of business relations between Sovereign Wealth Funds and the bank. Their requests that their close family relations be hired by BNY Mellon was contra to the banks own process of selecting candidates for its internship program from a exclusive group of universities and colleges in the US and UK. The Order noted, “Successful applicants had to achieve a minimum grade point average, and had to advance through multiple rounds of interviews in addition to having relevant prior work experience and a demonstrated affinity for and interest in financial services work.”

None of these indicia were present in the hiring of the foreign governmental official’s relatives at issue. There was no evidence the candidates met any of BNY Mellon’s own internal criteria for consideration to the internship program. Indeed, as the Order stated, “as recent graduates not enrolled in any degree program, the Interns did not meet the basic entrance standard for a BNY Mellon postgraduate internship.” Finally, to top it off, all three were hired sight unseen and “BNY Mellon decided to hire the Interns before even meeting or interviewing them.” 

The Internships

But BNY Mellon’s violative conduct did not stop by simply hiring the three close family relatives for its internship program. The three persons got benefits far more than simply a regular internship program. BNY Mellon designed special “Bespoke” internship programs for the three interns. As requested by their fathers and uncle, the three interns received “customized work experiences” which “were not regular undergraduate or graduate summer internships at all, but customized one-of-a-kind training programs. The internships were valuable work experience, and the requesting officials derived significant personal value in being able to confer this benefit on their family members.”

The internships were abnormally long, lasting six months, which was twice the normal length. Additionally they were “rotational in nature, meaning that Interns A, B and C had the opportunity to work in a number of different BNY Mellon business units, enhancing the value of the work experience beyond that normally provided to BNY Mellon interns.”

The Costs

In addition to the exceptions granted in the hiring process and the internships themselves, BNY Mellon also paid out money and non-monetary benefits in a manner different to others in the internship program. The Order stated, “BNY Mellon determined, because Interns A and B had already graduated from college, that Interns A and B should be paid above the normal salary scale for BNY Mellon undergraduate interns but below the scale for postgraduate interns. Intern C was unpaid. BNY Mellon also coordinated obtaining visas for all three of the Interns so that they could travel from the Middle East to work in the countries in which they were placed. BNY Mellon paid the legal fees and filing costs related to the visas. As the BNY Mellon Asset Management employee responsible for arranging two of the three internships wrote in a contemporaneous e-mail, the internships constituted an “expensive favor” for the requesting foreign official.” Indeed the Order cited to an email from one BNY Mellon employee who wrote, “I am working on an expensive ‘favor’ for [Official X] – an internship for his son and cousin (don’t mention to him as this is not official).” Further, BNY Mellon knew the request and accommodation was unethical, if not illegal, as the same employee wrote in another email, ““[W]e have to be careful about this. This is more of a personal request . . . [Official X] doesn’t want

[the Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund] to know about it.” The same employee later directed his administrative assistant to refrain from sending email correspondence concerning Official X’s internship request “because it was a personal favor.”

Lessons Learned Going Forward

I must emphasize once again that there is nothing illegal around the hiring of a close family member of a foreign governmental official. It does however present a higher risk for indicia of bribery and corruption and violation of the FCPA. A higher FCPA risk means you need to evaluate that risk more closely and manage that risk accordingly.

The obvious starting point for any hiring of a close family member of a foreign governmental official is whether the candidate is qualified for the position. If they are not qualified it is ‘Full Stop’ at that point. In the case of BNY Mellon there was no evidence any of the candidates had the academic background, the academic credentials, leadership traits or intangible skills to meet the bank’s normal internship hiring criteria. As with any other anomaly granted in a company’s normal process, there must be a documented reason for the exception, review by appropriate authority of the exception and documentation as to why the exception was granted. None of these steps were present in the BNY Mellon matter. Put another way, if you are hiring a family member or close relative of a foreign government official for any reason other than merit, it had better be a darn good one and well-documented as to your decision-making calculus with appropriate senior management oversight.

But your risk management does not stop simply with the hiring process. If the foreign governmental official is the person who made the request for the hiring of the family member, this is a Red Flag not to be overlooked. Your analysis needs to be on the role of that foreign governmental official in awarding new business to your company or in retaining old business. If the foreign governmental official has direct or even strong indirect control over such business relation, this may present such a direct conflict of interest, this may be a risk that you cannot manage. A good rule of thumb here is whether there is full transparency in the hiring with the foreign government involved with your company. In the case of BNY Mellon, they did not want anyone in the Sovereign Wealth Fund to know BNY Mellon had hired the son or nephew. That is a clear sign transparency is lacking and someone, somewhere is engaging in unethical conduct, if not breaking the law.

Finally, if you do decide to move forward and hire the close family member, you need to assign that new hire to work not associated with the business relationship between your company and the foreign government involved. Just as in the lifecycle of third party management, managing the relationship after a contract is inked is in many ways the most critical element; the same is true in the employment relationship involving close family members of foreign government officials.

Ultimately, you need to have internal controls to ensure effective compliance going forward. You cannot have customer relationship managers making the calls on hiring which over-ride the Human Resources (HR) procedures. There must be not only HR review but also mechanisms to flag for compliance review such hires. Lastly, there needs to be sufficient senior management oversight because this is such a high-risk proposition.

I hope you have enjoyed and found this two-part series on the BNY Mellon FCPA enforcement action and the lessons learned from it useful. The SEC Order provides a clear road map to the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), compliance practitioner, HR professional or anyone else who reads it on the steps you should take in the hiring of a close family member of a foreign government official with which you are doing business. It may take some additional effort than simply having your business unit employees make the call on who to award prestigious internships to in order to obtain or retain business but in the long run you will have a better run company for doing so. FCPA enforcement is not a game and by doing compliance will make your company a more accurtely operated  entity.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

BNY Mellon Settles First Sons and Daughters (and Nephews) FCPA Hiring Matter – Part I

Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a resolution with Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (BNY Mellon) for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). This was the first enforcement action around the now infamous Princesslings and Princelings investigations where US companies hired the sons and daughters of foreign government officials to curry favor and obtain or retain business.

While JPMorgan Chase has garnered the most attention around this issue, probably because of its notorious spreadsheet tracking of sons and daughters hires to develop business in China, there are multiple US companies under scrutiny for similar conduct. The FCPA Blog has reported that Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and UBS are all under investigation by the SEC for their hiring practices around the sons and daughters of foreign government officials. BNY Mellon has the honor of being the first company to reach resolution on this issue.

This is an important issue for many companies going forward and since this is the initial enforcement action on this issue, I am going to take a deep dive into the matter over the next couple of days. Today, I will discuss the facts of the case and tomorrow I will discuss not only the lessons to be learned from this FCPA enforcement action but also how the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner can use those facts to graft a hiring program around the sons and daughters of foreign government officials which will not violate the FCPA.

In its Press Release, the SEC noted, “The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that BNY Mellon has agreed to pay $14.8 million to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by providing valuable student internships to family members of foreign government officials affiliated with a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund.” Andrew J. Ceresney, Director of the SEC Enforcement Division, was quoted in the Press Release as stating, “The FCPA prohibits companies from improperly influencing foreign officials with ‘anything of value,’ and therefore cash payments, gifts, internships, or anything else used in corrupt attempts to win business can expose companies to an SEC enforcement action. BNY Mellon deserved significant sanction for providing valuable student internships to family members of foreign officials to influence their actions.” Kara Brockmeyer, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s FCPA Unit, said, “Financial services providers face unique corruption risks when seeking to win business in international markets, and we will continue to scrutinize industries that have not been vigilant about complying with the FCPA.”

The Cease and Desist Order (Order) entered found that BNY Mellon violated the anti-bribery and internal controls provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.  BNY Mellon, “Without admitting or denying the findings, the company agreed to pay $8.3 million in disgorgement, $1.5 million in prejudgment interest, and a $5 million penalty. The SEC considered the company’s remedial acts and its cooperation with the investigation when determining a settlement.”

The underlying facts and BNY Mellon’s conduct as laid out in the Order provide some clear guidance for the CCO or compliance practitioner regarding what will be a violation of the FCPA in terms of hiring sons, daughters and close family relatives going forward. It should be noted that two of the hires were sons of foreign governmental officials and one was a nephew. However, the first important lesson under this enforcement action is around the parties involved. Although not identified by country, the foreign governmental entity involved was a Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund. If there was any question as to whether foreign sovereign wealth funds were covered under the FCPA, that answer is now clear, they are covered. All corporate actions should be cloaked with this knowledge going forward.

The Order also specified how the hiring of the relatives led directly to BNY Mellon obtaining and retaining business. One foreign government official, (Official X), “made a personal and discreet request that BNY Mellon provide internships to two of his relatives: his son, Intern A, and nephew, Intern B. As a Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund department head, Official X had authority over allocations of new assets to existing managers such as the Boutique, and was viewed within BNY Mellon as a “key decision maker” at the Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund. Official X later persistently inquired of BNY Mellon employees concerning the status of his internship request, asking whether and when BNY Mellon would deliver the internships. At one point, Official X said to his primary contact at BNY Mellon that the request represented an “opportunity” for BNY Mellon, and that the official could secure internships for his family members from a competitor of BNY Mellon if it did not satisfy his personal request.”

There were clear statements by the BNY Mellon official involved that hiring this son and nephew were being done to obtain or retain business. As reported in the Order:

• BNY Mellon was “not in a position to reject the request from a commercial point of view” even though it was a “personal request” from Official X. The employee stated: “by not allowing the internships to take place, we potentially jeopardize our mandate with [the Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund].”
• Another employee was quoted as saying, ““I want more money for this. I expect more for this. . . . We’re doing [Official X] a favor.”
• Yet another employee was quoted as saying, “I am working on an expensive ‘favor’ for [Official X] – an internship for his son and cousin (don’t mention to him as this is not official).”
• Finally, to demonstrate the nefarious nature of the arrangement and lack of transparency in the entire process, this final BNY Mellon employee said, ““[W]e have to be careful about this. This is more of a personal request . . . [Official X] doesn’t want [the Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund] to know about it.” The same employee later directed his administrative assistant to refrain from sending email correspondence concerning Official X’s internship request “because it was a personal favor.”

The second foreign government official, (Official Y), “asked through a subordinate European Office employee that BNY Mellon provide an internship to the official’s son, Intern C. As a senior official at the European Office, Official Y had authority to make decisions directly impacting BNY Mellon’s business. Internal BNY Mellon documents reflected Official Y’s importance in this regard, stating that Official Y was “crucial to both retaining and gaining new business” for BNY Mellon. One or more European Office employees acting on Official Y’s behalf later inquired repeatedly about the status and details of the internship, including during discussions of the transfer of European Office assets to BNY Mellon. At the time of Official Y’s initial request, a number of recent client service issues had threatened to weaken the relationship between BNY Mellon and the European Office.”

When it came to hiring Official Y’s son there were some equally damning communications at BNY Mellon that were featured in the Order.

• The BNY Mellon sovereign wealth fund relationship manager said, “that granting Official Y’s request was likely to “influence any future decisions taken within [the Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Fund].”
• The same person also worried aloud that if BNY Mellon did not hire the son, it “might well lose market share to a competitor as a result.”
• He went on to write ““Its [sic] silly things like this that help influence who ends up with more assets / retaining dominant position.”
• Finally, he noted that to accede to Official Y’s request was the “only way” to increase business share.

Added to all of this was that none of the three individuals met the BNY Mellon requirements for its internship program; they met neither the academic or professional requirement to obtain an internship. BNY Mellon not only waived its own hiring requirements, it did not even go through the pretense of meeting with them or interviewing them. Finally, these three individuals were provided with “bespoke internships were rotational in nature, meaning that Interns A, B and C had the opportunity to work in a number of different BNY Mellon business units, enhancing the value of the work experience beyond that normally provided to BNY Mellon interns.”

The penalty was also interesting. As set out in the order BNY Mellon agreed to the following penalty amount: “disgorgement of $8,300,000, prejudgment interest of $1,500,000 and a civil money penalty in the amount of $5,000,000, for a total payment of $14,800,000.” The SEC noted the cooperation efforts of the bank in stating, “Respondent acknowledges that the Commission is not imposing a civil penalty in excess of $5,000,000 based upon its cooperation in a Commission investigation.” Further, BNY Mellon engaged in extensive remediation. The Order stated, “Prior to the investigation by the Commission of the Interns, BNY Mellon had begun a process of enhancing its anti-corruption compliance program including: making changes to the Anti-Corruption Policy to explicitly address the hiring of government officials’ relatives; requiring that every application for a full-time hire or an internship be routed through a centralized HR application process; enhancing its Code of Conduct to require that every year each employee certifies that he or she is not responsible for hiring through a non-centralized channel; and requiring as part of a centralized application process that each applicant indicate whether she or a close personal associate is or has recently been a government official, and, if so, additional review by BNY Mellon’s anti-corruption office is mandated.”

Tomorrow I will look at lessons learned for the CCO and compliance practitioner and how you can avoid the missteps of BNY Mellon in your hiring program going forward.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

Georgia On My Mind – How Does Compliance Enhance Shareholder Value?

Can you get a sense of place from listening to a song? In an article in the Financial Times (FT), entitled “The Life of a Song – Georgia On My Mind”, Mike Hobart wrote that when you “combine Stuart Gorrell’s lyrics with Hoagy Carmichael’s music… the sense of place becomes palpable.” While that may be true, the piece attributed to Frank Trumbauer who said, “Nobody ever lost money writing songs about the South”. The song did not become the well-known standard it is today until Ray Charles recorded it in 1960, some 30 years after Carmichael wrote it. Hobart believes that the song works so well “not the least because ‘Georgia On My Mind’ is a brilliant piece of imaginative fiction that captures the yearnings of a homesick soul. That fact and fantasy are so out of step only adds to the pathos.”

That ultimate line from Hobart’s piece struck me around an issue that I have thought about for some time. How many Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) and compliance practitioners out there have faced the following question from the General Counsel (GC), Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO) What does it do to enhance shareholder value? This is the question that is posed when senior management wants to deny resources to or even cut back the compliance function. At best the question is disingenuous and at worst it is simply a dodge by someone wanting to denude a corporate compliance function for their own nefarious reasons.

Michael Skapinker raised this second point, in another FT article entitled “Shareholder value is a cover for over-mighty chief executives”. Skapinker further opines that this question also presages an inquiry into whether CCOs “are using the cover of shareholder primacy to put themselves first?” While he also condemned the disparity in the growth of senior executives salaries and true shareholder value, Skapinker worries about the lack of accountability of CCOs and how their actions can damage a company’s reputation.

So how do you respond to this query? I think there is an answer with which you can always respond when faced with a clearly hostile CEO or other senior manager. It is the following. A best practices anti-corruption compliance program, whether based on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), UK Bribery Act or other anti-bribery law always enhances shareholder value. The reason is quite simple. It is all about tightening up the internal controls to prevent bribery and corruption.

However the part that such CEOs or other senior management may not understand is that FCPA internal controls are largely financial controls. Such controls are in place not only to comply with laws but also to provide internal oversight on how money flows out from an organization. The better the internal financial controls the better run a company will be in both the short and long term.

Most readers are familiar with Ethisphere’s annual designation of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Many commentators deride this list because many of the companies on the list have gone through a FCPA investigation or enforcement action. Even with that factor, one of the things that Ethisphere touts about this list is that the companies on it routinely outperform the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Index in annual performance. I thought about this seeming anomaly for a long time, wondering how ethical companies could be in the midst of FCPA investigations and be on a most ethical list.

The reason these companies are on the list is that they have better financial controls and by having better financial controls, these companies are more generally better run. Think about financial controls around employee expense reimbursement as an example. These are in place to satisfy Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules to demonstrate the business purpose of employee travel, entertainment of customers, hospitality for potential customers and similar business expenses. Now consider this IRS requirement overlaid with a FCPA compliance requirement. Not only do you need to record the foreign government officials (or not) that you entertain, you need to document the expense incurred and the business purpose. If the expenses were predetermined to be over the amount set in your compliance policy, you may require compliance department pre-approval. When an employee submits an expense reimbursement form, there is usually a signature or self-attestation required. Then the employee’s supervisor, and perhaps one level above, must approve the reimbursement request before it even gets to Accounts Payable (AP) for a financial and procedure focused review.

All of these steps are financial controls yet they operate as internal compliance controls as well. If the controls are enforced the compliance function would have a searchable database to test employee expense reimbursement requests to see if any anomalies appear which should be set aside for further investigation. Imagine how GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK) might have fared if it had properly assessed its Chinese employee reimbursement requests to determine if the employees had actually put on the events for which they claimed reimbursement.

The same financial control analogy is true for the other key steps in any best practices compliance program. Management must communicate the message regarding doing business in compliance down to the troops. This message should be formalized in policies and procedures to set expectations of behavior. Then there should training on these educations and a person or function sufficiently resourced to run it. Next there should be incentives to do business in compliance and sanctions for those who fail to meet the set expectations and an appropriate reporting mechanism for internal reporting of compliance violations. Any best practices FCPA compliance program would also have a risk assessment, management of third parties and a mergers and acquisition (M&A) component. Finally, all of these concepts should be memorialized through internal controls that are designed, implemented and tested for effectiveness.

So the next time one of those senior management types asks you what the compliance function does or even what an expenditure that you want to incur will do to increase shareholder value, you can not only point him (or her) to the Ethisphere Most Ethical Company list but you can dive down to the specific level of your company and point directly to one of the above concepts around internal controls, which are really financial controls, to make your company not only run more efficiently but also provide appropriate levels of oversight.

So just as Hoagy Carmichael may indeed have written Georgia On My Mind because no one “ever lost money writing songs about the South”; no company was worse run because it had effective internal controls. Quite the contrary, the more effective your compliance controls are the better run your company will be and that will most certainly enhance shareholder value.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

OIG Compliance Guidance for Health Care Governing Boards

On the front page of the Saturday New York Times (NYT) was an obituary for Edward Thomas, who joined the Houston Police Department (HPD) in 1948 and finally retired in 2011 at the age of 90. As reported in the article, entitled “Edward Thomas, Policing Pioneer Who Wore a Burden Stoically, Dies at 95”, when Thomas joined the HPD, “he could not report for work through the front door. He could not drive a squad car, eat in the department cafeteria or arrest a white suspect. Walking his beat, he was once disciplined for talking to a white meter maid.” The reason was that Thomas was the first African-America to don a uniform for the HPD. Yet through stoic service and professional leadership, Thomas became the longest serving Houston police officer and had the HPD Police headquarters renamed in his honor earlier this year.

I thought about how Thomas led the HPD to the modern era in the area of race relations in the context of a report, issued in April, by the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Department of Health and Human Resources, entitled “Practical Guidance for Health Care Governing Boards on Compliance Oversight” (the OIG Guidance). Through this paper, the OIG provided compliance practitioners and health care company Board of Directors its views on the proper role of a Board in overseeing a corporate compliance function.

As an introduction, the OIG Guidance states that a Board must act in good faith around its obligations regarding compliance. This means that there must be both a corporation information and reporting system and that such reporting mechanisms provide appropriate information to a Board. It stated, “The existence of a corporate reporting system is a key compliance program element, which not only keeps the Board informed of the activities of the organization, but also enables an organization to evaluate and respond to issues of potentially illegal or otherwise inappropriate activity.” The OIG Guidance sets out four areas of Board oversight and review of a compliance function; “(1) roles of, and relationships between, the organization’s audit, compliance, and legal departments; (2) mechanism and process for issue-reporting within an organization; (3) approach to identifying regulatory risk; and (4) methods of encouraging enterprise-wide accountability for achievement of compliance goals and objectives.”

While noting that a corporate compliance function should promote the prevention, detection and remediation of compliance violations, the OIG Guidance goes on to state that an organization’s Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) “should neither be counsel for the provider, nor be subordinate in function or position to counsel or the legal department, in any manner.” Rather the Board must ensure the CCO and compliance function have resources to fulfill their assigned role within an organization and access to the Board. The Board should “evaluate and discuss how management works together to address risk, including the role of each in:

1. identifying compliance risks,
2. investigating compliance risks and avoiding duplication of effort,
3. identifying and implementing appropriate corrective actions and decision-making, and
4. communicating between the various functions throughout the process.”

A key component of Board oversight is through the flow of information. The OIG Guidance says, “The Board should set and enforce expectations for receiving particular types of compliance-related information from various members of management. The Board should receive regular reports regarding the organization’s risk mitigation and compliance efforts—separately and independently”. These reports can come to the Board via a variety of reporting mechanisms; regular Board meetings, special Executive Sessions where the Board meets with the CCO or compliance leadership outside of the presence of senior management and ad hoc communications from the CCO. All of these help create a “continuous expectation of open dialogue” which is paramount for proper Board oversight. Of course, if a serious compliance issue arises, it needs to be communicated directly, and in a timely manner, to the Board.

But in addition to setting the expectations for the flows of information, a Board must also set expectations for holding senior management accountable for areas such as compliance. This can be through the assessment of “individual, department, or facility-level performance or consistency in executing the compliance program” and using this information to payout or withhold discretionary based bonuses “based upon compliance and quality outcomes.” The OIG Guidance also notes, “Some companies have made participation in annual incentive programs contingent on satisfactorily meeting annual compliance goals. Others have instituted employee and executive compensation claw-back/recoupment provisions if compliance metrics are not met.” However the key component is that “Through a system of defined compliance goals and objectives against which performance may be measured and incentivized, organizations can effectively communicate the message that everyone is ultimately responsible for compliance.”

A Board also needs to have regular reports on the risks that any organization may face. This means keeping abreast of “relevant and emerging regulatory risks, the role and functioning of an organization’s compliance program in the face of those risks and the flow and elevation of reporting of potential issues and problems to senior management.” The OIG Guidance speaks to technological solutions when it says, “Some Boards use tools such as dashboards—containing key financial, operational and compliance indicators to assess risk, performance against budgets, strategic plans, policies and procedures, or other goals and objectives—in order to strike a balance between too much and too little information. For instance, Board quality committees can work with management to create the content of the dashboards with a goal of identifying and responding to risks and improving quality of care.”

Moreover, a Board should also mandate that the company’s compliance function have the proper tools in place to facilitate compliance reporting internally. It states, “Boards should also consider establishing a risk-based reporting system, in which those responsible for the compliance function provide reports to the Board when certain risk-based criteria are met. The Board should be assured that there are mechanisms in place to ensure timely reporting of suspected violations and to evaluate and implement remedial measures. These tools may also be used to track and identify trends in organizational performance against corrective action plans developed in response to compliance concerns.”

Ultimately a Board should drive home of the message of compliance as “a way of life” so that it permeates into the DNA of a health care organization. For if a Board can help drive compliance into the fabric of an organization, it will have done more than simply fulfill its legal obligations starting in the Caremark decision and going forward. The Board will have helped to make the entire organization more compliance-centric and when a Board can help to facilitate such a change in attitudes, it will have moved the organization several steps down the road of doing business in compliance with relevant laws and issues.

The OIG Guidance is an excellent review for not only compliance professionals and others in the health care industry but a good primer for Boards around their own duties under a best practices compliance program. The US Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Ten Hallmarks of an Effective Compliance Program, the “OIG voluntary compliance program guidance documents, and OIG Corporate Integrity Agreements (CIAs) can be used as baseline assessment tools for Boards and management in determining what specific functions may be necessary to meet the requirements of an effective compliance program. The Guidelines “offer incentives to organizations to reduce and ultimately eliminate criminal conduct by providing a structural foundation from which an organization may self-police its own conduct through an effective compliance and ethics program.” The compliance program guidance documents were developed by OIG to encourage the development and use of internal controls to monitor adherence to applicable statutes, regulations, and program requirements.”

It is a document well worth your consideration.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

The BHP Case and Enforcement of The FCPA’s Internal Controls Provision

Ed. Note-today we have a guest post from Jean-Michel Ferat ,CPA, CFF is a Managing Director in the Washington D.C office of the Claro Group around his views on the BHP Billiton enforcement action. 

Much has been made in the last few months of the SEC’s seemingly aggressive stance in the BHP Billiton case. Many FCPA practitioners have taken the view that the SEC likely over-reached and set a wobbly precedent in extracting a $25 million civil settlement from BHP for its alleged internal control failure relating to the identification of hospitality payments to government officials that could potentially have been subject to some quid pro quo arrangement.

This appears to be a standout case for the SEC, even when compared to the 2012 Oracle case. In Oracle, the SEC had at least the existence of an off-the-books slush fund which on its surface appeared to have been set up for nefarious purposes. In most if not all SEC enforcement actions in the last 5 years, it would appear that internal controls violations were coupled with a books and records violation: in other words shady accounting. With BHP, the SEC had a company that identified a specific corruption risk, established a control to mitigate that risk but failed to execute it adequately. No off-the-books slush fund, no fake invoices, no fictitious vendors, no circuitous payments to government officials….. In other words: no shady accounting.

Accounting Controls vs. Compliance Controls

The BHP case is important for another reason. It helps to illustrate a thorn in the side of most organizations when it comes to establishing and documenting a comprehensive control structure: the distinction between accounting controls and compliance controls. I won’t argue here whether a literal interpretation of the law should restrict our regulators and law enforcement to violations of accounting controls or whether it extends to other operational controls – e.g. compliance controls – as well. What I will argue is that the distinction between accounting controls and compliance controls is not purely semantic but one with practical implementation, enforcement and reporting differences within most organizations.

When one of thinks of accounting controls in the context of corruption risk, one thinks of controls over accounts payable, petty cash, vendor set-up, disbursements and the like. In essence, these are controls that address whether cash out the door is going to its intended recipient and whether it is properly accounted for in the company’s books and records. These types of controls over financial reporting have received persistent scrutiny under SOX 404 and are typically “owned” by a company’s finance function (e.g. accounting manager, controller, CFO). Conversely, compliance controls are ones that do not necessarily impact a company’s financial reporting process but are meant to ensure compliance with laws and regulations. In the case of the FCPA, such controls might include mandatory FCPA training for employees, audit rights in third party contracts, and due diligence surrounding third party representatives. These controls are not usually “owned” by the finance function but are typically fall to the legal department or CCO. This division of labor makes sense for most organizations but it has the often-times negative effect of creating control “silos” where neither finance nor legal has a complete picture of FCPA risk mitigation.  The primary mechanism for countering this silo effect is (1) implementing an enterprise wide risk management process (2) mapping those risks to the detailed internal controls (both accounting and compliance) designed to mitigate and (3) disseminating this information to upper management across the entire organization.

The Risk Management Process and Linking Controls to Identified Risks

A company’s Enterprise Risk Management Process should be used to identify perceived risks to the organization and put in place a risk mitigation plan. In most company’s though, the mitigation plan is often kept at a very high level and rarely includes a deep dive into the detailed accounting and compliance controls currently in place or that must be implemented to adequately mitigate risk. In the case of FCPA risk, we often see companies undertaking corruption risk assessments and addressing internal controls at a very high level, but similarly, we rarely see such risk assessments taking a deep dive into the specific controls in place to manage corruption risk.

In the case of BHP, employees actively identified a new corruption risk and sought to mitigate it. Where it looks to have failed was by not integrating the newly identified risk into its overall risk management process and ensuring that the newly established control was adequate to mitigate the risk. Had BHP included the identified risk into its overall risk management process, it likely would have benefited from:

1. visibility of the perceived risk by various parts of the organization including Finance, Legal, Operations and members of the Risk Committee of the Board, if one existed;
2. A clear determination of who within the organization was responsible for mitigating the risk;
3. A chance for internal audit or another group within the organization to evaluate whether the established controls were sufficient and operating effectively.

Linking detailed internal controls to identified risks is a laborious task, in particular in decentralized organizations with varying types of internal controls in different geographic locations and/or business segments. The BHP case and newly established COSO guidelines would suggest however that organizations should seriously consider performing this task. FCPA scholars will wait to see whether the SEC’s position on BHP is part of an emerging pattern of internal controls enforcement or a one off anomaly. Regardless, public issuers should take heed and look to shoring up their risk management and internal control processes before the regulators come knocking.

Editors Note-a reader noted the line “Most notable in this case is the fact that the SEC did not charge BHP with either a books and records violation or an anti-bribery violation, but an internal controls violation alone,” is incorrect. BHP was charged with a Books and Records violation of the FCPA. This line has been removed.

Jean-Michel Ferat, CPA, CFF is a Managing Director in the Washington D.C office of the Claro Group and has over eighteen years of experience in the specialized fields of forensic accounting and fraud detection. He has applied his skills in a variety of cases involving financial statement fraud, high-level corruption, terrorist financing, collusive bidding rings, money laundering, embezzlement, asset misappropriation. HE has undertaken dozens of corruption investigations around the globe including a lead role in the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme investigation. He can be reached at jmferat@theclarogroup.com.

Cymbeline – Doing Virtue and FCPA Compliance

Commentators still level the hue and cry that it is somehow the fault of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that companies continue to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Things would improve if only the DOJ and SEC would (1) prosecute companies more aggressively; (2) prosecute companies less aggressively; (3) make an example of ‘rogue’ employees who violate their corporate overseers pronouncements not to violate the law; (4) prosecute more corporate executives to ‘send a message’; (5) amend and clarify the FCPA because the concept of do not pay bribes is somehow too complicated for mere mortals to understand; (6) implement a compliance defense because apparently the DOJ does not consider that enough in any decision to prosecute; and/or (7) as The Donald desires, simply do away with the FCPA to restore the ability to pay a fair price for fair corruption.

I thought about all of these varied and contradictory reasons when considering one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic plays, Cymbeline. In an article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled “The Long, Painful Drama of Self-Knowledge”, Stephen Smith considered the character Posthumus who was thought of as virtuous yet, through the crush of the plot, has his virtuous image shattered. Smith poses the question of “Why is Posthumus such a poor leader of himself, and a danger to others?” He answers his own question by saying, “The play suggests that his lack of self-knowledge, along with the flattery of his culture, make him overconfident.” In other words, he was human.

I thought about this analysis in the context of the recent accounting and financial scandal that engulfed the Toshiba Corporation in Japan. For those who did not follow the news, Toshiba announced last month that it had overstated its profits from 2008-2014 by over $1 billion dollars. This was in the face of the company having been publicly recognized for its good governance standards and practices. In an article in the Financial Times (FT), entitled “Japan Inc left shaken by Toshiba scandal”, Kana Inagaki reported, “On paper, it had a structure that gave its external directors the authority to many top executives and an auditing committee to monitor the behaviour of the company’s leaders. It was lauded for its efforts. In 2013, the group was ranked ninth out of 120 publicly traded Japanese companies with good governance practices in a list compiled by the “Japan Corporate Governance Network.””

But it was all a sham as it turned out that chairman of the audit committee was in on the fraud in addition to a plethora of top executives. Kota Ezawa, an analyst at Citigroup was quoted in the piece that “Toshiba was lauded as the frontrunner in governance efforts but that was a misunderstanding. Its governance structure looked good but the execution was not.” Ezawa further stated, “We need to make sure that companies understand that having structures is not enough.” So even a company with $52bn in annual sales must have more than a paper program.

For those who want to point to some defect in the Japanese corporate character, reminding us of the Olympus scandal from 2011, where successive corporate executives covered up long running accounting fraud, Andrew Hill, also writing for the FT in an article entitled “The universal dangers shown by Toshiba’s failings”, says not to point that self-righteous finger quite so quickly. He reminds readers of WorldCom from earlier this century. Being from Houston, I would remind readers of Enron and its accounting fraud as well. Hill cites to the work of Professor Michael Jones to identify four main types of accounting fraud, (1) increasing income, (2) decreasing expenses, (3) increasing assets, and (4) decreasing liabilities. Hill further notes that one common failing in all of these examples is the failure of internal controls. A second key failing is the “Unwillingness to challenge authority, a trait attributed to employees at Toshiba and Olympus — and often given an “only in Japan” spin — is a recurring problem everywhere, from Royal Bank of Scotland under Fred Goodwin to Fifa under Sepp Blatter.”

Hill’s explanation of the how and why of these accounting scandals is as age old as the time of Cymbaline. He wrote, “The most important lesson from Toshiba is about the malign impact of top-down pressure to meet unrealistic targets. Toshiba’s ex-chief executive denies having given direct instructions to staff to inflate profits. But the investigating panel said he told executives to “use every possible measure to achieve profitability” and added that Toshiba’s corporate culture did “not allow employees to go against the will of their superiors”.”

The lessons that Hill finds in the Toshiba accounting scandal are equally applicable to FCPA compliance and enforcement. It is not the DOJ or SEC’s “fault” when companies do not comply with the FCPA. It is up to the companies to which the law applies to comply with it. Make no mistake; it is quite simple not to pay bribes. One only has to wake up and say “I am not paying a bribe today, no matter what the economic benefit is to me”. Yet for a company, it is not easy because you have to not only put the appropriate controls in place, but you have to do compliance by ensuring these controls are executed upon. That was the failing of Toshiba, it had the controls in place but it did not execute on them.

I think this speaks directly as to why FCPA violations continue to occur and be prosecuted. Hill ended his piece by noting, “When aggressive targets, irresistible management pressure and weak controls coincide, misconduct can spread quickly. Rival companies see the inflated numbers and strain to match them. To suggest such weaknesses are confined to one corporate or national culture is a first step into dangerous complacency.” As long as humans are involved with corporations and there are incentives in place for more and greater sales, you will always have the motivation to cut corners and pay bribes. That impulse can be brought on by a bump in salary, a nice bonus, a promotion or sometimes simply keeping your job. That is why a compliance program must be put in place and those controls must be effective.

In Cymbeline the protagonist Posthumus learns that one key component of virtue is prudence. Near the end of his article on Shakespeare’s play Smith writes, “In his story, we glimpse one goal of Shakespearean drama: to help forge just such a character – an integrated human person capable of leading himself and others to peace, with the help of virtue.” For FCPA compliance, as long as there are incentives in place to make money, there will be people who cut corners by paying bribes. Yet companies can temper this by putting an effective compliance program in place and actually doing compliance. Much like Posthumus learns in Cymbeline it is one’s actions which lead to being virtuous; for a company, it is doing compliance that leads to it being called ethical.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

What Goes Downhill May Go Uphill in FCPA Compliance

Usually the question I am posed is how far down the chain must you go in your due diligence to ensure that your suppliers are in compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). I would pose that now, after the Petrobras scandal, a company may need to examine the flow in the other direction. I thought about this directional shift when I read an exhaustive report in the Sunday New York Times (NYT) on the Petrobras scandal, entitled “Brazil’s Great Oil Swindle”, by David Segal. The article reviews the genesis of and details the ongoing nature of the Petrobras scandal.

While I have previously written about the other Brazilian companies that have been caught up in the scandal, such as Oderbrecht, Camargo Corrêa and UTC Engenharia, Segal’s article detailed a level of immersion in corruption that should concern every US Company subject to the FCPA and catch the eye of Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors handling FCPA cases. It appears that the companies that had direct contracts with Petrobras also colluded in the old-fashioned anti-trust sense, so that not only did they control all the subcontract work done on any Petrobras project but they would also demand bribes from the subcontractors which they then passed up the chain to Petrobras executives and eventually Brazilian politicians. If this scheme turns out to be true, it literally could explode potential FCPA exposure for any US Company doing business on any subcontract where Petrobras was the eventual beneficiary.

Segal reported, “according to prosecutors, these companies stopped competing and started to collaborate. They formed a cartel and decided, in advance, which of them would win a particular deal. A charade competition was orchestrated, and the anointed winner could charge vastly more than it would in a free market.” Further, “A document obtained by prosecutors laid out what it called the “rules of the game.” The trumped-up bidding process was labeled a “sports tournament”, with an assortment of rounds and a “trophy.” There was a no-sore-loser codicil, too: “The teams that participate in a round should honor the rules that have been agreed on, even when they are not the winner.”

But the corruption did not stop simply at these non-Petrobras entities. These companies would demand bribes from their subcontractors that they passed up the line to Petrobras. Segal wrote, “From 1 to 5 percent of the value of a given contract was diverted to those on the receiving end of the scheme, a group that included 50 politicians from six parties, according to prosecutors. Money from cartel members took a circuitous route to politicians’ pockets, passing through ghost corporations whose owners made bribes look like consulting fees.”

Think about all of this for a minute. What happens when everyone and every company associated with a National Oil Company (NOC) is in on the corruption? I thought about this question when I read an article in the Financial Times (FT) by Andres Schipani, entitled “We were terrorized by the drop in oil prices”, where he discussed how the drop in world oil prices has negatively affected Venezuela more than any other top oil producing company. Part of the country’s trouble is the rampant corruption around its NOC PDVSA. Schipani quoted a former minster for the following, “The design of the political economy here only benefits the corrupt.” Moreover, the country is near the bottom of the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TI-CPI) coming in at 161^st out of 175 countries listed.

Most Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) and compliance practitioners had focused their third party risk management program around third parties, first on the sales side and then in the Supply Chain (SC). However now companies may well have to look at other relationships, particularly those where the company is a subcontractor involved in a country prone to corruption with a NOC or other key state owned enterprise. Last year the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an article entitled “Venezuelan Firm Is Probed In U.S.”, by José De Córdoba and Christopher M. Matthews, reported that a US company ProEnergy Services LLC (ProEnergy), a Missouri based engineering, procurement and construction company, sold turbines to Venezuelan company Derwick Associates de Venezuela SA (Derwick), who provided them to the Venezuelan national power company. The article reported that the DOJ’s “criminal fraud section are reviewing actions of Derwick and ProEnergy for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act”. Derwick was reported to have been “awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts in little more than a year to build power plants in Venezuela, shortly before the country’s power grid began to sputter in 2009”. All of this with a commission rate paid by ProEnergy to Derwick of a reported 5%.

The Brazilian investigation poses far more dire consequences for any US Company that did business with the cartel of Brazilian companies that had locked up the Petrobras work. It means that you need to go back immediately and not only review the underlying due diligence which you did (probably none); then review the contracts with those entities; and, finally, cross-reference to see if there were any contract over-charges which were rebated back to the cartel members. If so, you may well have a serious problem on your hands as any unwarranted rebates, refunds, customer credits or anything else that could have been readily converted into cash to be used to fund a bribe.

This second part is one thing that challenges many compliance officers. The compliance function does not always have visibility into the transactions assigned to specific contracts or projects like your company might be engaged in for Petrobras in Brazil. However it also speaks to the need for transaction monitoring as not simply a cutting edge technique or even best practice but a required financial controls tool that is also applicable to compliance internal controls as well.

As Brazilian prosecutors expand ever outward from Petrobras, US companies subject to the FCPA and UK companies and others subject to the UK Bribery Act would do well to review everything around their Brazilian operations, contracts and dealings. The Petrobras scandal has shown two clear trends to-date. First is that we are far from the end of this scandal. Second, the prosecutors have been fearless so far in following the corruption trail wherever it may go. If they follow it to US companies, they could prosecute them on their own in Brazil for violation of domestic anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws or turn the evidence over to the DOJ. The thing to do now is to get out ahead of this all too certain waterfall.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

Social Media Week Part VI – Social Media and CCO 3.0

I conclude this exploration of the uses of social media in doing compliance by exploring why the compliance function is uniquely suited to using social media tools. Long gone are the days when Chief Compliance Officers (CCO) or compliance practitioners were lawyers housed in the Legal Department or the General Counsel’s (GC’s) office writing policies and procedures and then putting on eight hour training programs on same. Donna Boehme has written passionately about CCO 2.0 and the structural change to separate the CCO role from that of the GC because of the differences in focus of a CCO and GC. Simply put, a GC and legal department is there to protect the company while the CCO and compliance function exists to solve problems before the company needs protections from them.

Freed of the constraints to write policies and procedures by lawyers for lawyers, the profession has moved to integrating compliance directly into the fabric of the company. I often say that a Foreign Corrupt Practices (FCPA) compliance program is a business solution to a legal problem. The problem is how to comply with the FCPA and other anti-corruption regimes. The solution is to burn compliance into the DNA of your company so that it is not only owned by the business unit but also acted on by the business unit in its day-to-day operations.

I think this means that we are now moving to CCO 3.0 where a CCO or compliance practitioner is putting compliance into the forefront of how a company does business. The example of safety comes to mind when every corporation I ever worked at made clear that safety was everyone’s responsibility, literally from the shop floor to top of the company. I once heard of a Executive Vice President (EVP) of a major oil and gas operating company, while touring a contractor’s facility, stop the tour to point out that a contractor carry two bags of trash down a set of stairs was an unsafe practice and required the employee to carry one bag at a time so she could hold the handrail while descending the stairs. That is the level of the awareness of safety now.

The evolution of compliance is just as dramatic. Moreover, the compliance function should be on the cutting edge of moving it forward within your company. The important thing to remember about social media tools is precisely that; they are tools that a CCO, compliance practitioner or any company can use to communicate with their employee base. Put another way, social media is but one part of the communication ecosystem which can be used to market the message of compliance.

Last week I wrote that there are still many companies who do not allow their employees access to the most popular and useful social media tools at work or even on company computers. While these companies always claim it is due to security issues, the reality is that they simply do not trust or even respect their employees. In such a company, management is much more concerned about what employees might say about an organization than trusting that they not only want to do the right thing but will execute such a strategy when provided the opportunity to do so, through the mechanism of social media. This means that companies which trust and respect their employees do not have to worry about employees releasing confidential data through social media channels because there are plenty of other ways that employees can release confidential information if they were so inclined. Indeed think of the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower provision and how many employees who report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reported or tried to report internally before going to the SEC. Simply put if a company does not trust and respect its employee base, communicating the message of compliance throughout an organization will be more difficult but that is clearly not the signal senior management is sending to its employees.

The compliance function must engage with its customer base, AKA the employees in a company. Charlene Li, in her recent work “The Engaged Leader”, said in the introduction “In order to be truly effective today, leaders in business and society must change how they engage, and in particular how they establish and maintain relationships with their followers via digital channels.” The same is true for the compliance function. She believes that technology has changed the dynamic between leaders and their followers. In The Engaged Leader she explains:

• Why leaders need to master a new way of developing relationships, which begins by stepping out of traditional hierarchies
• How to listen at scale, share to shape, and engage to transform
• The art of making this transformative mind shift
• The science of applying the right tools to meet your strategic goals

Li believes that “This transformation is not optional. Those who choose not to make this change will be abandoned for those who inspire people to follow them.” In an interview for the podcast HBR Ideacast, entitled ““Social Media Savvy CEO” is no Oxymoron”, Li further expounded on these views. She asked why a leader would be afraid to engage with those in his or her corporation? But more than simply engagement, she asked why would a leader want to cut themself off from the best source of information for them and available to them; their employee base, through social media. After all, every company strives to have an active engagement with their customer base so why not have it with employees.

Now change out Li’s language from ‘leaders’ and insert ‘CCOs or compliance practitioners’. I think it is even more critical for the CCO or compliance practitioner because doing compliance is something that should occur in the business units. Yes a CCO can put those policies and procedures in place but it is the folks in the field who must implement them going forward. If social media can be a tool to help facilitate doing compliance why not embrace it for communications, training, input, problem identification or resolution?

Yet there is another reason for the compliance function to embrace social media going forward. One of my favorite thought leaders around innovation in the legal arena is Professor David Orozco. In a blog post, entitled “Innovation in the Legal Sector”, he said, “Innovation is a big deal. It’s been a big deal ever since customers rewarded differentiation and punished companies that failed to maintain their creative edge.” The same is equally, if not more so, applicable to the compliance arena. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has consistently made clear that FCPA compliance programs should be evolving and using the newest and best tools available. That sounds suspiciously like social media to me. So if these tools are available to you and at a very reasonable cost (i.e. free) why not consider using them. If you are afraid of information getting out of your company, why not consider using the social media concepts behind your firewall in your company intranet system?

Finally, even if you cannot use some of the publicly available tools discussed earlier, there is no reason that you cannot incorporate the concepts into your compliance program. By that I mean you can use the communication ideas inside of your company for your compliance program. You can create the equivalent of a Tweet-Up where the CCO or others answer questions that employees submit. Similarly, you can live stream a Q&A session using the concepts articulated by Meerkat and Periscope for social media live streaming. Pinning compliance reminders or other information in some type of internal company bulletin board is using the basic concept of Pinterest. I am sure that you can accomplish the same by using SharePoint. Why not create an internal compliance reminder video series using the same tools that a millennial would use to create a Facebook post?

Think all of this sounds far-fetched? Think again. In this month’s issue of the Compliance Week magazine, Guest Columnist Raphael Richmond, the CCO at Ford Motor Company, in an article entitled “Compliance? There Should Be an App for That!”, detailed how the company has created an app for iPhone and Android devices that “allows users to access compliance information quickly, including brief, easy-to-understand policy summaries and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). The app also has a “Can I … ?” tab that acts as a quick decision tree for finding specific answers to commonly asked questions. Topics in our app address a range of compliance issues, from anti-bribery guidance to Ford’s approach to gifts and favors, meals, travel, and social events. Individuals can also report a suspected violation directly from the app to the Corporate Compliance Office.” It will certainly be exciting to see how Ford develops this tool going forward.

I often say that as a CCO or compliance practitioner you are only limited by your imagination. The use of social media in your compliance function is one that is crying out for imaginative usages. As we move to CCO 3.0, the compliance function will need to avail itself of all the tools it can to communicate the message of compliance. The DOJ currently requires companies that enter into Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) to keep abreast of technological innovations in compliance. How long do you think it will take for the DOJ to start asking how much compliance communication you have both up and down the chain? If you are not using a social media tool or even a social media technique you may already be behind the 8-ball and you certainly will be left behind in the marketplace of ideas going forward.

I hope that you have enjoyed this six-part series on the use of social media in your compliance program as much as I have enjoyed researching it, writing and posting it. If you are currently using social media tools, concepts or techniques in your compliance program please contact me, as I would appreciate the opportunity to learn more about what your organization is up to in that realm. Also, please remember that I am compiling a list of questions that you would like to be explored or answered on the use of social media in your compliance program. So if you have any questions email them to me, at tfox@tfoxlaw.com, and I will answer them within the next couple of weeks in my next Mailbag Episode on my podcast, the FCPA Compliance and Ethics Report.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

What Would Dr. Seuss Say about an Allowance?

Earlier this month we had the release of a second book by Harper Lee, “Go Set a Watchman”, which was miraculously discovered having been written some 50+ years ago. This week, there was another release from a (now deceased) author from a newly discovered source. I of course refer to the release yesterday of the new Dr. Seuss book “What Pet Should I Get?”, published Random House, which informs today’s compliance lesson.

The book was discovered by Seuss’ widow, as noted in the Sunday New York Times (NYT) Book Review article, entitled “Dr. Seuss Book: Yes They Found it in a Box”, when she decided to “have the rest of his notes and sketches appraised, that they closely examined the contents of that box. They found a set of brightly colored alphabet flash cards, some rough sketches titled “The Horse Museum,” and a manila folder marked “Noble Failures,” with whimsical drawings that he had been unable to find a place for in his stories. But alongside the orphaned sketches was a more complete project labeled “The Pet Shop,” 16 black-and-white illustrations, with text that he had typed on paper and taped to the drawings. The pages were stained and yellowed, but the story was all there, in Dr. Seuss’ unmistakable rollicking rhymes.” This finding became the book, What Pet Should I Get?

Reading this discovery made me ponder about how a child would pay for the pet they wanted and of course my thoughts turned to that age-old parenting quandary – the allowance. It is always a question of great interest for both parents and children. As with many things involving parent/child relationships, my views have evolved. As a teenager, I certainly had the view that an allowance was a God-given right and the more the better. I would only note that my parents did not share those views. As the father of a teenaged daughter, my views reached the much fuller expression of spoiling my daughter as often as possible. Which one is correct? I still do not have a final answer.

I thought about the ongoing debate and dialogue over the allowance when I read the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Mead Johnson Nutrition Company (Mead Johnson). The matter was resolved via SEC Administrative proceeding that concluded with a Cease and Desist Order being agreed to by the parties. Mead Johnson agreed to pay a fine of $12.3MM which consisted of profit disgorgement of $7.7MM, prejudgment interest of $1.26MM and a civil penalty of $3MM. Kara Brockmeyer, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s FCPA Unit, said in a SEC Press Release, “Mead Johnson Nutrition’s lax internal control environment enabled its subsidiary to use off-the-books slush funds to pay doctors and other health care professionals in China to recommend its baby formula and give the company marketing access to mothers.”

The enforcement action turned on violations of the accounting provisions of the FCPA. This is where the ‘allowance’ issue comes into the discussion. According to the Cease and Desist Order, “certain employees of Mead Johnson China improperly compensated HCPs, who were foreign officials under the FCPA, to recommend Mead Johnson’s infant formula to, and to improperly provide contact information for, expectant and new mothers.” One of Mead Johnson’s sales channels in China was through distributors. To facilitate this illegal conduct, funding to the distributors, called the “Distributor Allowance”, was diverted to make illegal payments. The Cease and Desist Order stated, “Although the Distributor Allowance contractually belonged to the distributors, certain members of Mead Johnson China’s workforce exercised some control over how the money was spent, and certain Mead Johnson China employees provided specific guidance to distributors concerning the use of the funds. Mead Johnson China staff also maintained certain records related to Distributor Allowance expenditure by distributors. In addition, Mead Johnson China used some of the funds to reimburse Mead Johnson China’s sales personnel for a portion of their marketing and other expenditures on behalf of Mead Johnson China.”

This tactic was clearly a violation of the company’s books and records obligations under the FCPA. By doing so, Mead Johnson was able to hide its payments to doctors and health care providers (HCPs) from not only regulators but the company’s shareholders as well. As the Cease and Desist Order noted, the company’s “records were incomplete and did not reflect that a portion of Distributor Allowance was being used contrary to Mead Johnson’s policies.” Finally, the Cease and Desist Order concluded, “Up through 2013, certain Mead Johnson China employees made payments to HCPs using funds maintained by third parties. These funds and payments from the funds were not accurately reflected on Mead Johnson China’s books and records. The books and records of Mead Johnson China were consolidated into Mead Johnson’s books and records. As a result of the misconduct of Mead Johnson China, Mead Johnson failed to make and keep books, records, and accounts, which, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflected its transactions as required by Section 13(b)(2)(A) of the Exchange Act.”

However Mead Johnson did not stop with books and records violations. The Distributor Allowance manipulation allowed the China business unit to “improperly compensate HCPs was contrary to management’s authorization and Mead Johnson’s internal policies. Mead Johnson failed to devise and maintain a system of internal accounting controls sufficient to provide reasonable assurances that Mead Johnson China’s funding of marketing and sales expenditures through third-party distributors was done in accordance with management’s authorization.” Once again the Cease and Desist Order concluded, “Up through 2013, Mead Johnson failed to devise and maintain an adequate system of internal accounting controls to ensure that Mead Johnson China’s method of funding marketing and sales expenditures through third-party distributors was not used for unauthorized purposes, such as improperly compensating Chinese HCPs to recommend Mead Johnson’s products. As a result of such failure, the improper payments to HCPs occurred contrary to management’s authorizations, in violation of Section 13(b)(2)(B) of the Exchange Act.”

In an interesting twist Mead Johnson, based on an allegation of potential FCPA violations in China, performed an internal investigation on its China unit in 2011 and came up with no evidence. Somewhat dryly the SEC noted that the company did not make any self-disclosure around these allegations and “did not thereafter promptly disclose the existence of this allegation in response to the Commission’s inquiry into this matter.”

Yet after a second internal investigation in 2013 they turned up evidence of FCPA violations, the company “undertook significant remedial measures including: termination of senior staff at Mead Johnson China; updating and enhancing financial accounting controls; significantly revising its compliance program; enhancing Mead Johnson’s compliance division, adding positions including a second senior-level position; establishing new business conduct controls and third party due-diligence procedures and contracts; establishing a unit in China that monitors compliance and controls in China on an on-going basis; and providing employees with a method to have immediate access the company’s policies and requirements.”

While there was no statement regarding self-disclosure, the company did cooperate extensively with the SEC after the company was called to task. The Cease and Desist Order noted, “Mead Johnson subsequently provided extensive and thorough cooperation. Mead Johnson voluntarily provided reports of its investigative findings; shared its analysis of documents and summaries of witness interviews; and responded to the Commission’s requests for documents and information and provided translations of key documents. These actions assisted the Commission staff in efficiently collecting valuable evidence, including information that may not have been otherwise available to the staff.”

There are several lessons to be learned from the Mead Johnson enforcement action. If it was not clear from the GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK) imbroglio in China in 2013-14, your internal investigation must be thorough. Performing an investigation, finding no FCPA violations only to have a regulator sitting on your shoulder and later finding such evidence is never good. The SEC also reaffirmed its clear intention to continue to enforce the accounting provisions of the FCPA, with or without a parallel Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcement action. Companies must also take heed on their internal controls. Clearly certain China business unit employees had developed a work-around of the compliance internal controls by requiring the distributors to use their allowances to pay bribes. Internal controls must not only exist but they must be effective. That means you have to test their effectiveness, not simply tick the box that you have put them in place.

Finally, and I think Dr. Seuss’ compliance lesson is that when you give out an allowance, while you may restrict some of its uses, you certainly should not direct where the money is spent. Every kid knows that if you are told where to spend your allowance, it is really not your allowance. Perhaps Mead Johnson would do well to remember that long lost lesson from childhood.

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015

The Kitchen Debate Presages the FCPA Compliance and Ethics Report

On this day in 1959, occurred one of the more iconic events of the Cold War, that being the Kitchen Debate between US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It was called ‘The Kitchen Debate’ because it occurred in a US exhibition in Moscow, showing casing American domestic scullery esthetics, in the form in the kitchen of a model home built in the exhibition, where the two men went at each other. Nixon suggested that Khrushchev’s constant threats of using nuclear missiles could lead to war, and he chided the Soviet for constantly interrupting him while he was speaking. Taking these words as a threat, Khrushchev warned of Nixon and America of “very bad consequences.” Perhaps feeling that the exchange had gone too far, the Soviet leader then noted that he simply wanted “peace with all other nations, especially America.” Nixon rather sheepishly stated that he had not “been a very good host.” Whether the world pulled back from the brink of war in this model home’s kitchen or not will never be known.

One thing that is known, however is that the recent podcasts, up on the FCPA Compliance and Ethics Report, continue to bring some of the most relevant and unique voices and issues to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and anti-corruption discussion. If you have never listened to any of my podcasts I would urge you to check them out on the website highlighted above or by going to iTunes and searching for the podcast name and subscribing. The price is certainly right, as all of the podcasts are available at no cost.

Some of my recent highlights are:

Episode 180-I discuss the recently announced FCPA Master Class training I will begin in September, detailing the highlights and the great course material you have come to expect from my blogsite, books, white papers, eBooks and other publications I put out.

Episode 179-Tim Peterson, a partner at Murphy and McGonigle, discusses the ever-growing FIFA bribery scandal and what it may mean for US companies. As a former SEC lawyer and current white collar practitioner, Tim brings a unique perspective to the ongoing discussion around the burgeoning affair. He explains its importance to both the US and international fight against corruption

Episode 178-Dr. Ben Locwin joined me to provide some of his unique insight into risk assessments. Ben is a true thought leader around business process and practices. He writes, speaks and consults extensively in this area, in the pharmaceutical industry. He has thought about and written extensively on risk assessments and he brings an interesting perspective to this discussion, outside of the traditional anti-corruption compliance practitioner approach.

Episode 177-tone in an organization. I explore how a compliance function can help to create and move an appropriate culture of compliance throughout a company. By creating a tone from the top, into the middle and down to the shop floor you can burn compliance into the very DNA of your organization. Learn how in this podcast.

Episode 176-Tim Treanor was the lead counsel for PetroTiger in its FCPA investigation and held the company to sustaining a Declination from the Department of Justice to prosecute the company. This Declination was recieved in the face of the company’s three top executives pleading guilty to FCPA violations. Tim has called this case one of the most significant corporate enforcement stories of the past several years. Tune in to this podcast to hear Tim explain how he achieved this result and why he deems it so important. Every CCO and compliance practitioner needs to listen to Tim’s recap of this matter.

Episode 175-well known lawyer and law firm consultant Debra Bruce visits with me about the dynamics of law firm funding outside the US and how she believes it will change not only the practice of law in the US but how it could well change the delivery of legal and compliance services going forward. Any lawyer in private practice or in-house needs to understand the dramatic changes that are occurring in the financing of law firms outside the US and how those changes will come to this country.

Episode 174-Compliance Week Managing Editor Matt Kelly returns to talk about the 5^th anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act, what it got right and where there is room for improvement. He also discusses Uber and compliance in an interesting analysis of Uber’s conundrum with the California Labor Board over an employee.

Episode 173-Adam Turteltaub joins me to preview some of the upcoming SCCE Institutes and discusses the 2015 Compliance and Ethics Institute to be held October 4-7 in Las Vegas. Adam highlights some of the keynote speakers and unique opportunities for compliance practitioner to work, learn and commiserate together.

Episode 172-in a ‘must listen’ for any Chief Compliance Officer or compliance practitioner, Scott Killingsworth visits the podcast to discuss the recent SEC enforcement efforts against CCOs individually and what it may mean for compliance practitioners going forward. He reviews the underlying facts and how the enforcement actions appear to be different from the SEC’s stated position how and when CCO’s will be prosecuted.

The above list is but a short summary of some of my recent podcasts. The FCPA Compliance and Ethics Report is the only podcast dedicated to the FCPA, anti-corruption, compliance and ethics. The episodes are all under 30 minutes so they are easy listening on the commute to work, at the gym or even walking around the neighborhood. If you have not done so, you should go over and take a listen.

Finally a huge shout out to my friend and colleague the FCPA Professor on turning 6 today. He brings a unique and distinctive voice to the FCPA discussions.

 

This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The author, his affiliates, and related entities shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person or entity that relies on this publication. The Author gives his permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author. The author can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

© Thomas R. Fox, 2015