Welcome to the newest addition to the Compliance Podcast Network, Compliance and Coronavirus. This week, I visit with three Managing Directors from Affiliated Monitors about issues they are seeing around Covid-19 and the economy reopening, each from their professional perspective. In this episode I visit with Dionne Lomax on antitrust issues in mergers and acquisitions as the economy reopens and into Q3 & Q4.
Lomax is Managing Director of Antitrust and Trade Regulation at AMI. Ms. Lomax also teaches Business Law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and co-teaches a Health Care Competition seminar at the Boston University School of Law. Prior to joining AMI, Ms. Lomax dedicated her legal career to analyzing complex business transactions from an antitrust regulatory perspective. Prior to entering private practice, Ms. Lomax served as a Trial Attorney at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division’s Health Care Task Force where she analyzed the structure and operation of PHOs and IPAs, investigated health plan mergers, and other collaborative arrangements in the health care industry. She clerked for The Honorable Clifford Scott Green in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
For more information on AMI, check out their website here.
Tag: AMI
Welcome to the newest addition to the Compliance Podcast Network, Compliance and Coronavirus. This week, I visit with three Managing Directors from Affiliated Monitors about issues they are seeing around Covid-19 and the economy reopening, each from their professional perspective. In this episode I visit with Jesse Caplan on some of the critical compliance issues facing the health care industry and health care providers as we move to businesses reopening.
Caplan is the Managing Director of Corporate Oversight for Affiliated Monitors. Jesse is an attorney who has spent most of his career in the healthcare field, including as the General Counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services. At AMI, Jesse leads independent monitoring and proactive assessments of compliance and ethics programs in the healthcare industry, including hospitals, physicians, addiction drug treatment facilities, health insurers and others.
For more information on AMI, check out their website here.
Welcome to the newest addition to the Compliance Podcast Network, Compliance and Coronavirus. This week, I visit with three Managing Directors from Affiliated Monitors about issues they are seeing around Covid-19 and the economy reopening, each from their professional perspective. In this episode I visit with Rod Grandon on issues around government contracting, government contractors and businesses which received PPP funding.
Grandon retired from the United States Government in 2017 after serving as a member of the Senior Executive Service with the Department of the Air Force and the US Coast Guard. Immediately prior to his retirement, Mr. Grandon was the Air Force Deputy General Counsel for Contractor Responsibility and Conflict Resolution. In that capacity, he served as the Air Force’s Suspending and Debarring Official, exercising authority to exclude contractors from the federal marketplace and entering into administrative agreements to provide contractors the opportunity to improve their operations and practices in lieu of suspension or debarment. He is the current co-chair of the ABA Public Contract Law Section, Suspension and Debarment Committee. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer on matters relating to contractor responsibility.
For more information on AMI, check out their website here.
In this episode I visit with Feldman on what is the role of a CCO in strengthening the ethical culture of an organization. We began by considering that there are multiple levels and roles for those within and outside of the corporate compliance function within an organization. They include the CCO, a compliance practitioner and the compliance function itself. I asked Feldman how he sees the role of the corporate compliance function itself in strengthening the ethical culture of an organization? Feldman said it all begins with the response to a simple question, “who is responsible for culture in an organization?”
It is important for the CCO to be proactive in the role of shaping ethical culture, separate and apart from the CCO role in investigations, root cause analysis or ongoing monitoring. The CCO should work to eliminate barriers to aid in driving business success rather than being Dr. No from the Land of No. The CCO can work to coordinate all of the activities relating to building culture in an organization. Feldman provided a couple of examples.
The first was in the area of hiring and recruiting. Obviously, the nuts and bolts of this process is run through HR but the CCO can create a culture where the organization would only hire the right type of persons as employees. These hires would have an attitude and core values that are consistent with your company. A CCO can work to make sure that they understand the organization’s position with regard to fraud and other misconduct and this is incorporated into the interview process. Once a new employee is hired, the onboarding and training begins. Feldman noted that while HR certainly has a leadership role in those areas a CCO or corporate compliance function should also maintain a lead role to make sure the new employees understand their responsibilities in these critical areas. Further, Feldman believes, “it is a serious lapse” if the compliance function does not make clear that the company is quite serious about its Code of Conduct, that employees follow it and not violate it going forward.
This task is much more difficult without the leadership and the support of the Board. Feldman considers the role of the Board “is to provide leadership.” This is complimentary to the role of the CCO to ensure that the Board is “currently informed about the ground truth of the ethical culture and decision making of the company”. He believes one of the key areas has to do with warning signs, what are the warning signs of an unethical culture. This means it really is up to the compliance professional in the organization to have a good understanding of what is going on in the company and communicate any warning signs up to the CCO, CEO and the Board.
These warning signs can be a wide variety of behaviors and actions. Feldman said, “things like disrespectful attitudes, favoritism or nepotism in promotions or bonuses, low employee morale, lack of teamwork, a large number of anonymous whistleblower complaints which could reflect a fear of speaking up, employees who report that they were uncomfortable talking to their supervisors and are afraid of retaliation.” These are the kinds of things that a CCO needs to be on top of and communicate both the condition and recommended solutions to the CEO and Board.
In this podcast, I visit with Vin DiCianni, founder of Affiliated Monitors, Inc. In it, we explore corporation culture and its relationship to ethics and compliance. We began with senior leadership. A company does not have an ethical culture unless the top management commits to it going forward. Employees not only listen to what they say but they watch how they act. Employees look for signals about what really counts in an organization. But you must then move down to implementation of this goal. Employees want to know if senior leadership is committed to the company’s core values. But equally important is a sense of organizational justice and fairness. Employees want to not only see they will be treated fairly but there is not a delineation of favorites and non-favorites in an organization. DiCianni emphasized that it is the senior leadership who really drives the alignment between incentives and performance.
The key is that there be an alignment between what top management says, coupled with the company’s core values and what the organization says together with what they do. This all comes from senior management getting out of their office and talking to employees in the field to see not only what they think but how they feel. No company aspires to be unethical and most assuredly employees do not want to engage in unethical behavior but if senior management does not talk to employees they will not know how their messages are being received. It does not take long when there is a disconnect between what senior management says and what the employees take away. It is a bit disconcerting how little top management really understand their employees. Because of this, senior leaders do not know what messages they are receiving, both verbal and non-verbal.
In this podcast with Jerry Coyne, the Managing Director of State Monitoring Services at Affiliated Monitors, Inc. and we consider the role of state AGs as enforcers of civil law and in bringing litigation to enforce consumer protect and related statutes.Every US state and territory has an AG, whose role is to serve as the chief legal advisor for that state. State AGs are empowered to prosecute violations of state law, represent the state and its employees when sued, and usually to provide legal advice to state agencies and to the state legislature. But its most important and most challenging role may be the right to bring litigation – to file suit – in the name of the state. Due to the massive amounts of money flowing to the states, most states took on this responsibility by adding staff not just to their AGs, but to other agencies with tobacco enforcement responsibilities, such as taxation and revenue departments, and state police organizations. The entry of the MSA in 1998 brought unprecedented amounts of new revenue to the states, but also resulted in the states agreeing to take on the responsibility for new and unprecedented enforcement activities to enforce the settlement’s terms, lest the anticipated flow of monies be reduced or even eliminated.
The disruption brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic has ensured that the government contracting sector and organizations working on federally funded projects are no longer conducting business as usual. From an ethics and compliance perspective, organizations large and small, profit and not-for-profit, need to maintain a robust ethics and compliance program, but now it is within a starkly different environment. Government contractors, grant recipients, and others working on federally funded programs must understand and respond to changing compliance risks to maintain the adequacy and effectiveness of their policies and procedures.
In this webinar our panelists will discuss current challenges and practical responses to help organizations maintain the effectiveness of their ethics and compliance programs in the current crisis. They will also present a framework for an ethical decision-making process based on practical considerations and industry experience. Join Moderator, Rod Grandon, Managing Director, Government Services, at AMI and Panelists, Eric Feldman — Senior Vice President, Managing Director, Corporate Ethics & Compliance Programs at AMI, Dismas Locaria — Partner at Venable LLP and Thomas Topolski — Executive Vice President, Infrastructure Business Development at Parsons Corporation.
For more information on AMI check out their website, here.
In this concluding Part 5, we consider the road ahead and the use of monitors by state AGs. The current state of multi-state litigation may be summed up by acknowledging the extraordinary talents of AG staff in litigating multi-state actions, while recognizing the extraordinary challenge of making sure that the conditions imposed as a part of virtually every settlement are carried out. Fortunately, there is a road ahead that offers a solution to the states at no cost.
In Part 3, we consider the role of state AGs in multi-state litigation in the post-tobacco era. Despite the challenges posed by the tobacco settlement, state AGs used the new-found collective power to exercise their jurisdiction in a number of areas. However, settlement of these cases became more complicated than it had been before as no defendant wanted to become “the next tobacco” or more specifically, the next potential deep-pocket for the state AGs to target. While governors and legislators certainly wanted to take advantage of this new potential revenue stream, a number of states took steps to limit the circumstances when the AG could hire outside counsel, or to regulate the selection process through which a counsel could be retained.
In Part 2, we consider the reaction to the Big Tobacco settlement and criticisms directed at the state AGs. In the immediate aftermath of the tobacco settlement, state AGs basked in the praise of bringing millions and millions of dollars to their states, perhaps even in perpetuity. Among those most appreciative were the nation’s governors and state legislatures, to whom the tobacco settlement represented a new and unexpected source of state revenue. For their part, the state AGs now realized that they had greater power working collectively than individually. This lesson was particularly clear to smaller states, which lacked the resources to sue a national industry on their own. But even the larger states recognized that forcing a defendant to fight against multiple states gave them leverage they had not previously enjoyed.
