Welcome to the Great Women in Compliance Podcast, co-hosted by Lisa Fine and Mary Shirley.
In today’s episode, Lisa speaks with one of the “OG GWICs,” and one of the first interviewees, Ellen Hunt. Ellen joined Spark Compliance in 2021, and is always a supporter for women in compliance, and in compliance as a whole. Today, we follow up on her 2021 podcast, where Lisa and Ellen discussed how the E&C profession is addressing retaliation, and the importance of anti-retaliation as part of speaking up.
The main discussion is about organizational justice, and particularly aspects of procedural justice, as this is one where compliance professionals can have a huge impact. They discuss the concept of consistent discipline and fairness, and what that can mean. They also discuss when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars telecast from an organizational justice standpoint, and how similar issues play out in corporations.
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Tag: CCO
It was the slap seen ‘round the world. It happened last Sunday night on the televised presentation of the 94thannual Oscars award ceremonies when Will Smith stormed to the stage after comedian Chris Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife’s lack of a full head of hair and, in front of audiences worldwide, delivered a slap to the face of Rock. Smith was incensed that, according to Emily Stedman, the comedian’s remark that his wife’s shaved haircut was reminiscent of famous film character G.I. Jane. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, has been openly suffering with the hair loss condition Alopecia since 2018.
Smith later won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Venus and Serena Williams’ father Richard Smith in the movie King Richard. Smith did not apologize for his actions during his acceptance speech and did not do so until “one day on from the altercation. “I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris,” he wrote. “I was out of line and I was wrong. I’m embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.”” Rock’s only statement on the affair to date, according to Nicole Sperling and Julia Jacobs, writing in the New York Times (NYT), has been “I’m still kind of processing what happened,” Mr. Rock said, briefly addressing the topic everyone was talking about. He promised to discuss it in greater depth later. “It’ll be serious, it’ll be funny, but I’d love to — I’m going to tell some jokes.””
Apparently after the incident, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said, “that the actor Will Smith was asked to leave the Oscars ceremony after he slapped Chris Rock onstage Sunday night, but that the actor refused to go.” The Academy did not take any steps to physically remove Smith from the event. What lessons should every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and compliance professional draw from this matter?
Workplace Violence
First and foremost, violence at the workplace is never justified. What if this had happened at your office? What would you do? Would you allow the perpetrator of the violence to remain as your employee? I should certainly hope not. What if you are in a state which allows guns to be carried. Do you risk the perpetrator walking up and shooting a co-worker over a joke, in poor taste or otherwise? Unfortunately, workplace violence happens all too often.
What if the person attacked (Rock) did anything to defend themselves? In watching the clip of the slap, you will see Rock kept his hands behind him. What if he had raised his hands to defend himself and then the perpetrator shot him. In the state of Texas and Florida that would probably bring the ‘Stand Your Ground’ defense into play if the perpetrator said he thought the person he was about to attack was going to hit the perpetrator and the perpetrator actually acted to defend himself. You can see how quickly all this can spiral out of control.
Not only should you make clear that violence will never be tolerated at work, but you should use this opportunity to train about underlying causes and red flags of workplace violence. There is clearly history between Smith and Rock, the slap seen ‘round the world did not come out of nowhere. Metal health at the workplace can be as important as physical health. Every CCO should use this opportunity to reassess your company’s overall programs in these areas.
Institutional Justice
What about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decision not to remove Smith from the theater? The Academy was on actual notice that violence had been perpetrated but (apparently) took no action. Another comedian, Wanda Sykes, one of the hosts of Sunday’s telecast, said in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres “that the moment was “sickening” to her and that she thought Mr. Smith should have been escorted from the building instead of being allowed to stay and accept his Oscar.” She went on to add, “For them to let him stay in that room and enjoy the rest of the show and accept his award — I was like, how gross is this? This is just the wrong message.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) made clear in the 2020 Update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs that it expects a CCO and corporate compliance function to be the keepers of Institutional Justice in an organization. One of the tenets of this concept is that all employees must be treated fairly and equally, literally from the Board room to the shop floor. You can bet your bottom dollar that if an employee at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles where the event was held had slapped an actor (or even a comedian) that employee would be escorted off the premises forthwith. The Academy certainly had the right and power to escort Smith off but failed to do so. Did their actions put Rock at additional risk? Possibly. What about the other attendees? I will leave that to your imagination.
What about actions by the Academy now to sanction Smith for his conduct? According to the NYT article, “The academy said that it had initiated disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith “for violations of the academy’s standards of conduct, including inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening behavior, and compromising the integrity of the academy.” It said that Mr. Smith would be given a chance to respond and that at its next board meeting, on April 18, it “may take any disciplinary action, which may include suspension, expulsion, or other sanctions.”” Stern stuff, or perhaps not, particularly if the Academy issues a stern statement to Smith “not to do it again.”
Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast which takes a deep dive into a compliance related topic, literally going into the weeds to more fully explore a subject. This week, Matt and Tom take at the recent remarks by DOJ Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite on CCO certifications of compliance programs after the conclusion of a DPA. Highlights include:
· Where did this issue come from?
· Is its implementation looming?
· What are the implications for individual CCO liability?
· What about CEO liability for recidivism?
· What are the corporate governance implications?
Resources
Text of Kenneth Polite speech
Categories
Attributes of a Toxic Corporate Culture
Corporate culture is finally being acknowledged as a key ingredient in a successful business, particularly one which operates ethically and in compliance. The Department of Justice (DOJ) formally recognized the need to assess corporate culture in the speech by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to the ABA White Collar Conference in October 2021. But what are some indicia of good culture and more importantly what are some indicia of a toxic culture? A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review provided some guidance. In Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture, Donald Sull, Charles Sull, William Cipolli and Caio Brighenti posited that by pinpointing the elements of toxic culture in a company, its leaders focus on addressing the issues that lead employees to disengage and quit. These ideas have significant importance for the compliance function as it navigates corporate culture, both in assessing and improving it.
Moreover, the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and corporate compliance function were identified in the 2020 Update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs as the keepers of institutional justice and institutional fairness. This mean recognizing and then preventing a toxic culture from spreading and infecting your entire organization is squarely in the compliance wheelhouse. The article lays out key red flags for every CCO and compliance professional to look for in assessing culture. Finally, for any company with a toxic culture, the chances are much greater to be defrauded by its own employees or to defraud others through bribery and corruption by violating such laws as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
The authors identify behaviors that they call “the Toxic Five attributes”, being “disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive – poison corporate culture in the eyes of employees. While organizational culture can disappoint employees in many ways, these five elements have by far the largest negative impact on how employees rate their corporate culture and have contributed most to employee attrition throughout the Great Resignation.” As a CCO or compliance professional you need to be on the watch for them and take steps to remedy them if you see or hear about them.
Non-inclusive Behavior
This is about whether your employees are “treated fairly, made to feel welcome, and included in key decisions.” It is “the most powerful predictor of whether employees view their organization’s culture as toxic. It applies to all demographic groups; “gender, race, sexual identity and orientation, disability, and age.” It can be outright discrimination to the equally invidious but more subtle conflicts of interests of nepotism and playing favorites. The topic of non-inclusiveness includes “terms like “cliques,” “clubby,” or “in crowd” that indicate that some employees are being excluded without specifying why.”
Disrespectful Behavior
The authors found that “feeling disrespected at work has the largest negative impact on an employee’s overall rating of their corporate culture of any single topic.” Lack of respect can occur in many areas. The most obvious is the lack of a speak up culture where employees understand it is useless to raise issues to management; whether serious matters such as FCPA violations to more straight-forward ideas such as process improvement. It can also be something as simple as whether or not to return to the office on a fulltime basis and whether management listens to employees about their desires to continue working from home or utilize some type of hybrid working arrangement. The authors noted, “whether you analyze culture at the level of the individual employee or aggregate to the organization as a whole, respect toward employees rises to the top of the list of cultural elements that matter most.”
Ethical Behavior
The authors believe that ethics “is a fundamental aspect of culture that matters at both the organizational and individual levels.” Interestingly, there are several different aspects to ‘ethics’ that every CCO needs to consider. Unethical behavior is “about integrity and ethics within an organization.” It also includes dishonesty, which “employees described dishonest behavior in many ways”, from outright lying to making false promises to shading the truth to simply “sugarcoating.” Under regulatory compliance employees talked about failure to comply with applicable regulations, including failure around safety standards.
Cutthroat Behavior
I found this category fascinating as it included both uncooperative co-workers and the lack of harmonization across organizational silos. This was not simply “friction in coordination” but situations where “employees talked about colleagues actively undermining one another.” It included what the authors termed as a “vivid lexicon to describe their workplace, including “dog-eat-dog” and “Darwinian” and talked about coworkers who “throw one another under the bus,” “stab each other in the back,” or “sabotage one another.””
Abusive Behavior
Having worked in law firms long ago, I understand abusive behavior. The authors called it “sustained hostile behavior toward employees” including such actions as “bullying, yelling, or shouting at employees, belittling or demeaning subordinates, verbally abusing people, and condescending or talking down to employees.” While one would hope such behaviors do not exist in the 21st century, they apparently still do. 0.8% of the employees surveyed for the article described their manager as abusive, however, when employees did mention abusive managers, it significantly depressed a corporate culture.
What CCOs and compliance professionals should try to drive forward is a “culture that is inclusive, respectful, ethical, collaborative, and free from abuse by those in positions of power.” But the authors caution that these are really the “baseline elements of a healthy corporate culture.” Employees want more than the basics and other stakeholders in an organization want companies to have strong official core values. In an interview with LRN’s Susan Divers, she called it the ‘value in values’. From the compliance professional’s perspective in means values like integrity, collaboration, respectful, and DEI.
In this episode of the FCPA Compliance Report, I am joined Susan Divers, Director of Thought Leadership at LRN. We discuss recently released LRN Ethics & Compliance Program Effectiveness Report. Highlights in include:
- What is the LRN Ethics & Compliance Program Effectiveness Report?
- What does it measure?
- How is it generated?
- Why is culture so critical?
- What are the values in values?
- What is LRN’s High Performance Premium?
- What are the roles of managers and leaders?
- What are the keys to effective training?
- What will the new normal for compliance programs look like going forward?
- The issue of culture and values down the road into 2025 and beyond.
Resources
Susan Divers
LRN Ethics & Compliance Program Effectiveness Report
The SEC releases regulations around climate change as Tom take a solo turn to look at some of the week’s top compliance and ethics stories in the Seeing Green edition.
Stories
1. SEC comes out with climate change regs. Andrew Ross Sorkin in NYTimes Dealbook. Matt Kelly in Radical Compliance. Tom and Matt in Compliance into the Weeds.
2. SFO spanked again. Andrew Crowley in MLex.
3. Getting rid of old data critical. Debevoise lawyers in Compliance and Enforcement.
4. The ‘S’ in ESG. Mike Volkov in Corruption Crime and Compliance.
5. FINRA and CCO liability. Matt Kelly in Radical Compliance.
6. IDB debars construction company. Harry Cassin in the FCPA Blog.
7. First ZTE monitorship ends. Jaclyn Jaeger in Compliance Week (sub req’d)
8. DOJ raises stakes. Todd Fishman, Noah Brumfield, Eun Woo Jhang and Elaine Johnston in CCI.
9. Top 6 ESG issues for 2022. Giles Newman in Risk and Compliance Matters.
10. A Privacy Shield replacement on the horizon? Neil Hodge in Compliance Week. (sub req’d)
Podcasts and More
11. In March on The Compliance Life, I visit with Audrey Harris, Managing Director at AMI, formerly CCO at BHP. In Part 1, she discussed her academic background and early professional career. In Episode 2, Audrey moved to the CCO chair at BHP. In Episode 3, she moved back to private practice. In Episode 4, she moves to AMI.
12. Tom has a two part series with Aly McDevitt on her recent Ransomware case study, on Greetings and Felicitations, Part 1 and Part 2.
13. Why should you attend Compliance Week 2022? Find out on this episode of From the Editor’s Desk. Listeners get a $200 discount to CW 2022 with the code Fox200. More here.
14. Tom visits with Pop Hair Art Salon founder, Michele Van Fossen on The Hill Country Podcast.
15. An undergrad degree focusing on ESG? Jules Oringel explains on the ESG Compliance Podcast.
Tom Fox is the Voice of Compliance and can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Jay Rosen is Mr. Monitor and can be reached at jrosen@affiliatedmonitors.com.
Categories
Sales incentives and Compliance
Sales incentives continue to be an area where Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) and compliance professionals work refine their compliance regimes. In the 2020 Update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (Update), Incentives and Disciplinary Measures, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated:
Incentive System — Has the company considered the implications of its incentives and rewards on compliance? How does the company incentivize compliance and ethical behavior? Have there been specific examples of actions taken (e.g., promotions or awards denied) as a result of compliance and ethics considerations? Who determines the compensation, including bonuses, as well as discipline and promotion of compliance personnel?
When considering how a company could use incentives to further a compliance program, and the role of HR in this process, we should also consider how incentives might lead to the converse, as they did in the now-infamous Wells Fargo fraudulent-accounts scandal. When you misalign these two concepts with a faulty sales strategy it can lead to a catastrophic failure, literally costing the company millions of dollars in fines, loss of business, and depreciation of shareholder value.
The sales incentives under which Wells Fargo came to such grief is a simple, and even benign, story of the cross-selling of products. After all, large banks cross-sell their clients all the time, and nobody seems to blink an eye at the cross-selling McDonalds engages in every time you buy a Big Mac when the representative asks if you would like fries with it. Yet there are other reasons for engaging in this type of business practice. Each and every time a company has a touchpoint, particularly a commercial touchpoint, with a business, it strengthens the relationship.
At Wells Fargo, however, what started off as a legitimate, legal and beneficial business strategy became not only high-risk, but illegal because of the manner in which Wells Fargo administered its approach to cross-selling. As with any sales initiative, if a company wants to push cross-selling, it will set up incentives for encouraging the sales team to engage in such behavior. This can be done by increasing commissions around the service or product being emphasized, such as the bank’s products. Companies can also increase sales by making clear that you will be evaluated on how much you sell a product or service. In other words, whether you receive a bonus, pay raise or even keep your job will be evaluated, in some part, on how much you cross-sell.
You can even have a hybrid of the above, which may be the worst of all worlds. At Wells Fargo, employees were evaluated for continuing employment by supervisors on cross-selling. Yet the employees did not receive the same financial incentives as the supervisors to make such cross-selling. Branch managers and supervisors could receive bonuses of up to $10,000 per month for meeting cross-selling quotas, whereas employees who hit their monthly quotas received, in addition to continued employment, $25 gift cards.
What about variable compensation? That is compensation based on alterable factors such as total sales, sales relative to a region, product line or other group. Some of the questions you might ask are: What does your bonus program consist of? Is it corporate performance based? Is it group performance based? Personal as in “eat what you kill”? Or is it some combination of all of the above?
A variable system can also lead to ethics and compliance failures. One reason could be similar to Wells Fargo—very high goals but no direction for employees on how to get there, coupled with a lack of communication between management and line employees, meaning there was raw fear from employees to inform their immediate supervisor of bad news. Conversely, it could be the supervisors who do not want to hear such bad news—for example, if your company has singular focus on numbers, meaning that is the single judge of your worth as an employee. Answering some of these questions if they arise can help you to understand the design of incentive plans and allow monitoring of incentive plans to identify underlying links that may arise through compliance violations.
Whatever your incentive structure, there will be employees who try to game the system. Some will do it with the tacit or explicit approval of management. You, as the CCO, may be required to act.
In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:
- FINRA considers CCO liability. (WSJ)
- Can Europe’s most corruption country be cleaned up? (The Guardian)
- AMLO urges Pemex to clean up corruption. (Mexico News Daily)
- Schlumberger, BH and Halliburton pull out of Russia. (Houston Chronicle)
Categories
Using Agile for Compliance Innovation
Driving innovation in your compliance program is still seen as one of the most difficult challenges for every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance professional. I was therefore intrigued by a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), entitled Purposeful Business the Agile Way by Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez, which discussed how business leaders can “transform a profit-maximizing system into a purpose-driven one without jeopardizing the future of their businesses and their own careers.”
Interestingly, the authors came to their approach due to the post pandemic great resignation, which they posit business leaders have no clue as to why there is such employee action and equally importantly how to adapt to it, stating, “For decades managers trusted influential economists who promised that if businesses maximized profits, an invisible hand would generate greater benefits for all society. That isn’t happening the way they said it would.” Yet business executives went overboard on creating value for shareholders as their only focus. The authors believe that such a myopic approach robs other “stakeholders of value.” That has certainly been the case for businesses treatment of employees. The authors conclude, “One recent manifestation: Record numbers of people are quitting their jobs, and others are hitting picket lines to demonstrate a growing conviction that life is too short to waste on demoralizing work. Concern about social inequities and environmental damage is escalating. The system is out of balance, and the situation is getting worse.”
Business executives stand at the turning point. They can continue down a destructive path or adapt. However, the problem is that most business leaders are afraid to change, afraid to create multiple stakeholders, as opposed to focusing solely on shareholders and do not want to listen to their employees. The authors believe, “agile ways of working can help, turning squishy debates about corporate purpose into real actions and results.” It provided to me numerous tangible ideas about how to drive innovation in the compliance arena. I have adapted the authors ideas for a corporate compliance program. The authors posit several concrete steps you can take, which every CCO and compliance professional should consider for their compliance regime.
Create a Microcosm
The authors suggest an approach not unlike Design Thinking. Here are some of their suggestions.
- Assemble a multidisciplinary team, including experts outside your silo.
- Develop deep empathy for users, exploring their goals and frustrations.
- Examine the current system to identify the causes of those frustrations.
- Envision a more purposeful system.
- Describe changes that might improve the system.
- Prioritize and sequence them.
- Test potential improvements.
- Adapt to unexpected effects and side effects.
- Scale up solutions that enrich the lives of stakeholders affordably.
Every CCO should be comfortable with these suggestions and steps.
Continuous Monitoring Leading to Continuous Improvement
Compliance, like business purpose, should not be viewed as a mechanical watch. In 2008, I heard then Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Lanny Breuer say that a best practices compliance program needed to be nimble and agile. Obviously, continuous monitoring and continuous improvement are mandated parts of a best practices compliance program in 2022. Where the authors expand on this basic component for any compliance program is around five questions you should ask about your compliance innovation.
These include: Does your compliance initiative support your strategic objectives and create important benefits for the stakeholders who have the most impact on the success of your business? Will multiple stakeholders actively support your compliance initiative? Will your investment in this compliance initiative create greater value for a wide variety of stakeholders, more “than would simply writing a check to a more economical innovator?” Finally, your compliance initiative should “test specific hypotheses and mitigate adverse side effects before scaling up the project.”
Do the Right Thing
Setting financial targets is one way of goal setting. However, as the authors note, “Agile helps flip that approach, focusing first on creating value for stakeholders and then on earning adequate profits in the process. Instead of asking, How can we improve profitability without damaging customer and employee satisfaction? they ask, How can we enrich the lives” of various stakeholder’s and employees?
In the 2020 Update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made clear that CCOs and the corporate compliance functions were the holders of institutional justice and institutional fairness in a company. In other words, you already have the obligation. Therefore, doing the right thing for both employees and other stakeholders is not something new for compliance professionals.
Prioritize Collaboration
If there is one thing compliance must do it is collaborate. Compliance generally does not have a hammer it can bring down but must lead through influence and working with others. Moreover, engagement with a wide variety of stakeholders in your company is a much better way to get something down as those stakeholders involved will be invested in the outcome if the are involved in its creation.
In the world of agile, the authors report, “A central reason for the success of agile ways of working is that they prioritize teamwork over individual performance. Research by the Standish Group, which has studied the success of IT projects since 1994, shows that agile teams improve software innovation by more than 60%, on average, and by 100% when the innovation is large and complex. Two-thirds of agile teams across a wide range of business functions report better cross-functional alignment, and 60% register higher team morale, according to the State of Agile Report by Digital.ai, a company focused on digital transformations.”
The bottom line is that by embracing these agile concepts, a CCO has a much better chance of implementing innovative change in their compliance program.
Categories
Taxman: Tax and ESG
In this episode of Taxman, Tom Fox and Tracy Howell conclude the special series by discussing a topic that has yet to be explored by most: tax and ESG.
How Tax and ESG Intersect
Tracy tells Tom, “There are external forces pulling tax into the ‘S’ and ‘G’ of ESG.” In the social sector, different jurisdictions have different tax rates and laws, and as companies begin to operate in a tax-efficient manner, their activities will gravitate towards lower tax regimes. Tracy adds, “You’ve got forces trying to push the concept of ‘fair share’ rather than compliance with tax laws of different jurisdictions.” Governance-wise, it’s becoming more common for companies to be required to talk about their compliance tax audits.
The Role of Tax in a Company
With the growing pressures on ESG transparency, there’s a push to standardize reporting and scorecarding of companies based on their tax transparency. This would include things like the reporting of an organization’s effective tax rate.
Tax and ESG in Multinational Organizations
Institutional investors play a major role in impacting the activities of a multinational company. When making investment decisions, these entities heavily incorporate ESG scorecards with tax transparency, further emphasizing the need for a relationship between the two sectors.
Resources
Tom Fox’s Email
Tracy Howell | Email | LinkedIn
