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...

March 6, 2013, 12 Noon -1 PM EST Register Here The art of day-to-day internal investigations has been ignored in favor of focus on high-profile, high-stakes internal investigations.  Companies need to plan in advance for conducting routine internal investigations which occur on a regular basis. Every compliance program needs to include a basic protocol for handling day-to-day internal investigations.  Such a protocol will protect a company...

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....

The HHS Office of Inspector General has targeted hospitals for fraud enforcement.  It is one of the OIG’s most important initiatives because of the impact it could have on reducing health care costs. The focus of the initiative is on coding practices – the reimbursement codes that hospitals use for Medicare reimbursement.  Medicare and Medicaid cover over 125 million people at a cost of nearly...

In this information technology era, it is little wonder that the Obama Administration has made enforcement of data security and privacy protections a top priority.  The enforcement emphasis reflects public opinion favoring strong privacy protections.  People fear big government and they fear privacy intrusions through the internet and internet commerce. Across all enforcement agencies, data security and privacy are high priorities.  The FTC is leading...

Sometimes lawyers get a bad rap.  We are always accused of making things more complicated in an attempt to protect our “guild” mentality.  Sometimes the criticism sticks and sometimes it does not.  It really depends on the issue and the specific concerns. If you want to see self-promotion, confusion and complication in action, all you need to do is focus on the “risk management” or...