There are obstacles when trying to buy a business from a foreign official. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits giving or offering anything of value to any foreign official with a corrupt intent to assist in obtaining or retaining business. It is not a flat prohibition on business relationships. But all of the recent FCPA … Read more »
New Lists to Check for Bad Guys
If you conduct business overseas or have foreign investors in your funds, you are checking the various block persons lists to ensure you’re not working with bad guys. (You are checking, right.) The Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, has created two new lists: the Foreign Sanctions Evaders List and … Read more »
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for March 21
Welcome to Spring. These are some of the recent compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention. Two Thoughts about Dewey LeBoeuf and Parallel Proceedings by David Smyth in Cady Bar the Door In a devastating New York Times story over the weekend, James Stewart zeroed in on that last sentence. Client relations manager? Who? Apparently it wasn’t … Read more »
Do Law Firms Need Compliance Programs? Part 2
Earlier this month it was accounting fraud. This week it’s insider trading. Law firms seem to pose the same risks as any other firm. Do as I say; Not as I do. A clerk at a law firm trolled the document management system for information on mergers when the firm was representing one of the … Read more »
Private Fund Compliance Forum 2014
On May 6 and May 7, I’ll be in New York for PEI’s Private Fund Compliance Forum. Let me know if you’ll be there. If you haven’t signed up yet, PEI was nice enough to offer a 15% discount to readers of Compliance Building. Use the promo code PFC14_CB. Agenda Update on the current trends … Read more »
Document Request List for Never-Before-Examined Advisers
In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced in its annual exam priorities for 2014 that it wanted to emphasize exams on never-before examined firms that had been registered before 2012. Then in February, the SEC officially announced its never-before-examined initiative. It looks a lot like the presence exams. ACA Compliance got its hands on … Read more »
Evacuation Day and Compliance
March 17 is more known for that other holiday where everything is green. You night not be celebrating today if it were not for the events of 1776. In 1776, British forces had occupied Boston for years. The local militia and Continental army had been harassing the British soldiers, leaving them isolated on the small … Read more »
Weekend Reading: Sycamore Row
I went to law school in the early 1990s so I’m supposed to be a John Grisham fan. The lure of doe-eyed law school graduates getting hired by big law firms paying big salaries was shadowed by the sinister practices in The Firm. I did read Grisham’s first few books and stopped. I enjoyed the … Read more »
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for Pi Day
Exploratorium physicist Larry Shaw began celebrating March 14 as pi day for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Behind the Myth of Insider Trading by SEC Employees by Bruce Carton in Compliance Week The authors also point to six specific cases in which “SEC employees appear to front-run … Read more »
Get Ready for the SEC to Knock on Your Door
With the SEC’s presence exam initiative for new registrants and the Never-before-examined initiative for existing registrants, the odds have never been greater that the SEC will knock on your door and start an examination. I’ve also heard from a friend that the SEC is coming in for a full blown examination of her firm. (I … Read more »