The federal criminal law prohibiting computer fraud has been in desperate need for a rewrite. Title 18, Section 1030, was drafted at a time in the mid-1980s when computer access was in its infancy — now, computer access is the primary terrain for serious criminal fraud, hacking and other transnational or organized crime. Given the current state of dysfunction in Washington, D.C., it is unlikely...

You just can’t make this stuff up – the Justice Department, displaying its growing sophistication of the cyber world, announced it recovered most of the ransom paid to criminal hackers of Colonial Pipeline Co. (Colonial).  As you will recall, Colonial’s pipeline had been the victim of a cyberattack resulting in a shutdown of a critical supplier of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.  Colonial paid the ransomware...

Stephen Naughton, a legal and compliance leader, has recently published an interesting article, Compliance Opportunities in and after the Time of COVID-19, in the Compliance Law Journal. The article is available here. Stephen is currently the Director, Regulatory Compliance Studies and Clinical Professor, at Loyola University, Chicago School of Law. Prior to his current role, Stephen served on the Volkswagen Monitorship with Larry Thompson, and...

Last week, I participated in an interesting webinar, sponsored by Clausematch, on Policy Management, Governance and Leveraging your Culture of Compliance. Joining me on the webinar was Willem Wellinghoff, Chief Compliance Officer, and Jeff Weiss, EVP at Clausematch. I hope you have a chance to listen to the replay. The discussion was interesting. The webinar replay is here. The slides can be downloaded here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is gaining traction in the enforcement of cybersecurity and disclosure requirements.  The SEC has a lot on its plate these days – ESG, cybersecurity, and the traditional mix of enforcement cases.  While the new Chairman has been chomping at the bit, he stumbled out of the gate in his selection of a new enforcement director, Alex Oh, who eventually resigned...

The Antitrust Division has pushed bid-rigging and price-fixing prosecutions of government contractors.  It is long overdue – fraud enforcement has uncovered a number of bid-rigging and price-fixing schemes among government contractors.  To focus on this enforcement priority, DOJ created the Procurement Collusion Strike Force, which was initiated in November 2019, and consists of a multi-agency task force designed to uncover antitrust price-fixing schemes. The case...

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Forgive me for going out on a limb here.  But this issue is fairly obvious.  A simple question: Should the Chief Compliance Officer be responsible for the Environmental, Social and Governance function? I have to set it up this way to give the dogmatic, binary, yes or no, answer, and then continue to outline a more nuanced discussion of the relationship between CCO and the...