Compliance Bricks and Mortar for December 13

These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention.

How Financial Institutions May Benefit from Changes to the Rule Against Perpetuities by Reid K.Weisbord in the CLS Blue Sky Blog

Now that most jurisdictions have repealed or abrogated the Rule Against Perpetuities, estate planning practitioners have started to consider whether a trust created to comply with the Rule could, after the Rule’s repeal, be extended in perpetuity to provide for future generations of the settlor’s descendants. In my forthcoming article, Trust Term Extension, I examine the issue of whether trust law doctrines would permit this type of modification. In particular, the article focuses on the trust law doctrines of equitable deviation and modification to achieve the settlor’s tax objectives.

An SEC Investigation Can Be A Bad Day, But It Can Get Worse by Thomas O. Gorman in SEC Actions

Becoming involved with an SEC investigation is a bad day for any company and its executives. There are things that can be done to make it better. There are also ways to make it worse, much worse. Executives at Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation, when face with a possible option backdating investigation, are an example of how to make it worse.

For Bitcoin, Square Peg Meets Round Hole Under the Law by Peter J. Henning in Dealbook

There is a Wild West quality to Bitcoin, created out of a libertarian bent that connotes a world beyond government regulation. Like any currency, it carries with it a degree of anonymity, much as the phrase “cash is an orphan” signals that money can be largely untraceable once put into circulation. More than ordinary cash, though, Bitcoin operates largely outside the current banking system, making it even more difficult to trace transactions.

An important real-world conflict of interest experiment in Conflict of Interest Blog

The results of this real-world experiment powerfully demonstrate the impact on the ethicality of conduct that financial incentives can have – even on the judgment of individuals who, by virtue of their professional norms, are supposed to be resistant to COIs.

Senator Levin Urges SEC to Toughen Proposed Monitoring of Reg. D Post Ending of General Solicitation Ban in Jim Hamilton’s World of Securities Regulation

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) said that the SEC’s proposal to monitor concerns over permitting issuers to engage in general solicitation under Rule 506 pursuant to the JOBS Act do not go far enough to protect investors from fraudulent offerings on what the Senator called “the soon-to-be “Wild West” that now exists under the final Rule 506. In a letter to the SEC, he urged the Commission to further enhance the proposal to ensure that investors in Rule 506(c) offerings are provided with full disclosure information and that such investors are actually accredited investors as required by Congress.