The Internal Revenue Service has had success encouraging taxpayers with offshore accounts to disclose their foreign accounts and pay back taxes.  In 2009 and 2011, the IRS announced the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program (OVDP) which allowed taxpayers to come forward and report foreign income, bank accounts, and other assets.  The IRS had 33,000 voluntary disclosures, resulting in $4.4 billion in taxes, interest and penalties.  In...

Compliance professionals are fast-rising stars in every organization.  They are the unsung heroes who try to ensure compliance, usually with a shortage of resources. The compliance profession is undergoing a significant change.  Directors and senior management are empowering chief compliance officers and elevating their status. With increasing power and influence, come some of the burdens as well.  A recent survey of compliance professionals revealed that...

Last month, JP Morgan Chase took a giant leap in corporate governance when it released its internal report on the $6 billion loss scandal.  A task force report, along with a board committee report outlined forward-thinking reforms and structural requirements to enhance compliance. As I have written on numerous occasions (with Donna Boehme), companies need to empower their chief compliance officers by clarifying his or...

You can always count on the FCPA paparazzi.  When things are quiet in the FCPA world, they will take a mountain and turn it into a molehill.  They have nothing better to write about; they have nothing better to focus on then two recent district court decisions addressing the issue of jurisdiction over foreign individuals. The headlines reported that the government had suffered a major...

Life is full of anxieties.  We all know that.  Some suffer worse anxieties than others.  As I often say, anxiety comes and goes.  Anxiety cannot be measured but is something that everyone experiences on their own terms. Corporate boards suffer anxiety.  When a group or organization suffers anxiety, the possible damage to an organization can be significant.  In some respects the whole of the anxieties...

People like to talk to people (as opposed to animals or inanimate objects).  People also like to tell people secrets.  Some like to confess and others do not.  Sociopaths and psychopaths do not often confess. An internal investigation is only as good as the information elicited during interviews.  I do not mean to belittle the importance of collecting and reviewing documents.  But documents provide the framework,...

Every day the headlines report another Fortune 500 company suffering a hacking incident.  For companies, the hack itself creates substantial risks of economic devastation caused by the theft of valuable trade secrets.  Add to the mix the potential disclosure of consumer and employee information, and potential data breach notification risks, and you have a recipe for corporate disaster.  Company and government internet sites are now...

The government has been increasing its focus on healthcare fraud involving “quality” of care.  This is an extremely difficult issue, especially for prosecutors.  It is very difficult to define “quality” standards and then base civil and criminal prosecutions on violations of these standards.  Healthcare providers can always walk into court and claim they were trying to provide their patients with the “best” care possible. When...

It is always important to consider how different parts of the government handle voluntary disclosures.  The FCPA enforcement initiative has been largely the result of the voluntary disclosure process, and the government continues to urge companies to disclose potential violations.  Other enforcement programs follow different voluntary disclosure protocols. In the healthcare industry, the HHS-OIG has established its own voluntary disclosure process.  Assuming a company has...

One of the drawbacks of a global economy is the rise in trade secret theft.  In the absence of a seamless global enforcement infrastructure foreign actors have had little fear of being caught and suffering any consequences.  When competition gets tough, some bad actors – foreign governments or company employees — like to steal trade secrets in an attempt to catch up in the marketplace....