Deputy Attorney General Yates Unless you have been on a monastic retreat or hidden as carefully as Hillary Clinton’s email server, you have by now likely read reports and analyses of the “Yates Memorandum,” a policy document issued by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates entitled “Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing.” (Here is the document: Yates-Memo-Prosecution-of-Individuals.pdf ). In this essay, I focus on one particular aspect that may be crucial for companies, their boards of directors, their audit committees and law department: The timing of potential disclosures to the Government and the degree to which outside counsel needs to have comfort that what he or she is relating to the Government…
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FIFA Indictments and the Notion of Global Compliance
In an article by Joel Schectman for the Wall Street Journal and its “Morning Risk Report,” Jack Sharman is interviewed about the idea of a global compliance regime in light of the recent indictments of FIFA officials: Jackson Sharman, a white collar specialist at Lightfoot, Franklin & White LLC, says that the case shows that the notion of a swelling, global compliance culture may be exaggerated. Attorneys and compliance professionals often make the mistake of believing their concerns about bribery are representative of the organizations where they work, he said. “It’s dangerous to assume that a legal regime is being internalized by everybody, because clearly it’s not,” Mr. Sharman said.…