Compliance Week 2010

I’m attending Compliance Week’s Fifth Annual Conference. It’s a great agenda. (Although it will hard to top last night’s Lost series finale. Although hopefully it will be less confusing and have more answers.)

I will try to publish my notes from the sessions I attend just as I did from the 2009 Compliance Week conference. Here is my tentative agenda:

The SEC’s Agenda: Enforcement and Regulatory Priorities
U.S. SEC Commissioner Luis A. Aguilar, dubbed “The Enforcement Commissioner” by Compliance Week in March 2009, will provide an update on SEC’s enforcement developments and priorities, including topics such as penalty guidelines and the SEC’s streamlining of the formal order process. Commissioner Aguilar will also explore broader regulatory priorities and the SEC.

Engage and Connect: Improvisation as a Tool for Open, Honest Communication
For many companies, a common ethics and compliance challenge is in finding fresh ways to make important topics relevant to their employees—engaging individual contributors and management in the conversation and creating a willingness to discuss tough subjects and grey-zone issues. Second City Communications, the business solutions division of the world-famous comedy theatre, will discuss how they’ve successfully utilized improvisation, humor, and learning methods to help clients improve ethics/compliance education and awareness. This session will include interactive exercises, small-group work, facilitated discussion, and multimedia to showcase how to create conversation, gain stronger insights, and make ethics and compliance topics more relevant for your global workforce.

High-Performance Compliance Organizations – What Works Best
How do you define “high performance” for the compliance organization? What works best when designing, implementing, and managing a compliance organization? What have other organizations learned as they have developed their compliance organizations? What learnings can you take home that will drive change, performance, and value? These are just some of the issues that will be explored in this interactive roundtable discussion. Join PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Joe Atkinson and chief compliance officers at Visa and PETCO Animal Supplies to gain perspectives on how others define “value” in the function and learn what works—and what doesn’t—in managing today’s compliance function.

Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt: Goldman Sachs, SEC Enforcement, and Lessons For Our Times
Prestigious firms sued by the SEC, subjects of negative reports, forced to endure angry Congressional testimony arising out of their involvement in the financial crisis of 2008, already provide important lessons for corporate executives. Kalorama Partners CEO Harvey Pitt—the former SEC chairman who has penned a Compliance Week column for seven years—makes his fifth appearance at Compliance Week’s annual conference with a look at the lessons executives can learn from current events.

Effective & Cost-Effective Training, Awareness & Advocacy
The compliance leaders at Terex, United States Steel, and Bertelsmann will preview their training programs, discussing how they train, how they track it, and how they gauge effectiveness.

Social Media & Compliance
Compliance, ethics, and legal executives at Johnson & Johnson, Best Buy, and The Travelers Companies will provide details on their social media policies, programs, and experiences, focusing on a variety of cultural, legal, and disclosure-related issues.

Tuesday:

U.S. Rep., House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank
Barney Frank is the U.S. House Representative for Massachusetts’ 4th congressional district. In 2007, Rep. Frank became the chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which oversees much of the financial services industry, including securities, insurance, banking, and housing. Rep. Frank will address those four industries in his keynote, and will take questions from attendees.

FCPA Issues Facing Multinational Companies
Curtis Lu, SVP and Deputy General Counsel, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer of Time Warner, and Baker Botts attorneys Andy Baker and Michael Barta will discuss the challenges associated with the growing trend of multi-sovereign enforcement efforts after Siemens, Halliburton and BAE. They will also discuss best practices and strategies for avoiding FCPA problems in international M&A activities after DOJ Opinion Release 08-02.

Metrics, Measurement, and Your Company’s Practices
Join Conseco Chief Compliance Officer Mark Johnson for a closed-door conversation on the metrics and measurement tactics employed by your company. Attendees will have the opportunity to compare and contrast their own policies in a safe environment, discussing the merit of “negative” vs. “positive” metrics, board reporting challenges, and the value of process-oriented vs. results-oriented data.

SEC Disclosure Update With Shelley E. Parratt
Shelley Parratt of the SEC’s Corporation Finance Division will provide an update of the Commission’s disclosure program, including topics such as executive compensation disclosure, climate-change disclosure, and other proxy disclosure issues, as well as updates regarding the Comment Letter process.

Demonstrating ROI and Communicating Value
How do you demonstrate and prove the value and success of your programs? The compliance leaders from The Home Depot, General Electric Company, and Duke Energy will discuss the tactics and data they have used to demonstrate the “net benefit” of compliance, ethics and risk programs.

Organizational Structures That Work: Small-Company Edition
In contrast to our “large company” edition Monday morning, this session will explore how smaller public companies structure their compliance functions. The CCOs at PETCO, Schnitzer Steel, and VeriSign—each with under $5 billion in revenue—will outline, compare and contrast the structure of their compliance organization, focusing on their functions, reporting structure, organization, responsibilities, infrastructure and more.

The 2010 OCEG GRC Achievement Awards Presentation
The Open Compliance and Ethics Group will recognize the great strides that many organizations have made in improving and integrating their approaches to governance, risk management, and compliance.

U.S. Dept. of Justice Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler
Gary Grindler, the second-highest ranking official at the U.S. Justice Department, will talk about the department’s policy goals and initiatives to fight corporate fraud, including white-collar crime issues such as securities and commodities fraud, healthcare fraud, and the work of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force.

Wednesday:

U.S. DoJ Asst. Attorney General, Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer
Lanny Breuer, selected by President Obama to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in January 2009, will discuss practical matters for companies dealing with the Justice Department, including topics such as cooperation, attorney-client privilege, and the importance of pre-existing compliance programs. Breuer will also discuss the Department’s increasing use of proactive law-enforcement strategies and tools, such as wiretaps, to combat financial fraud.

SEC Enforcement and Investigations Update
Compliance Week Columnist Bruce Carton, a former SEC Enforcement staffer, and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Enforcement, Market Abuse Unit Assistant Director Rob Cohen, will provide a recap of current SEC enforcement actions on topics such as the FCPA and insider trading, and will lead a discussion of the Enforcement Division’s new reforms to accelerate corporate investigations.

Second City Summary: Compliance Week 2010 Conference Wrap-Up
Get ready for a fun, interactive, high-energy conference closer from Second City Communications, the business solutions division of the world-famous comedy theatre. Using observations, ideas, and insights garnered from the entire three-day conference, Second City Communications will play back what they’ve heard, offering a real-time wrap-up of key conference takeaways, and providing a host of ideas you can bring back to your company. This is a closing session you won’t want to miss!