Compliance

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has already sent businesses more climate-related communications this year than it did over the course of the last decade. Kirkland Ellis attorneys say that's just a preview for what is yet to come.

Updated enforcement priorities and guidance on facilitating ransomware payments remind companies of all types to establish holistic AML policies and programs — and revisit them as events warrant, write Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr partner Joe Valenti and associate Christie McGuinness. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) this summer announced America’s first government-wide priorities list for anti-money laundering and countering...

The International Bar Association (IBA) COVID-19 Legal Policy Task Force has released a report detailing the pandemic’s impact in key legal areas and making concrete actionable recommendations to improve pandemic management in the future. The task force examined the impact of the pandemic on international legal systems, recognized the successes and failings of those systems in dealing with the outbreak...

New forced-labor requirements related to Xinjiang and a three-fold increase in enforcement by U.S. Customs have raised the risk of supply chain disruptions and penalties for U.S. importers. How should companies go about proving the negative: that their supply chains are forced-labor free?

Workplace technology provider Vault's first-ever "Trust Gap Report" has determined that despite a renewed awareness of and interest in preventing workplace misconduct, incidents like bullying and harassment remain common at offices in the U.S. and the U.K. Vault's survey of 2,000 office workers in the two countries found that about half of office workers in the two countries have personally...

Rapid adoption of collaboration tools during pandemic helped ensure employees and customers in financial services industry were connected, but research reveals that quick uptake of these platforms elevates compliance risk in regulated industries like finance. More than eight in 10 financial services executives say their companies are turning off key productivity and usability features of collaboration platforms like Zoom, Microsoft...

The Justice Department's probe into the generic pharmaceutical industry has resulted in three new settlements. Each arose from deferred prosecution agreements over violations of the False Claims Act anti-kickback statute. The healthcare industry faces cascading risks — one risk flows to another with compounding financial results. Three generic drug companies just experienced this cascading liability. As part of the Justice...

Menendez, Rubio and Merkley ask Universal Electronics to provide details of agreement with Xinjiang government to transfer 400 workers to company's Chinese factories A bipartisan trio of senators is asking for answers from U.S..-based electronics firm Universal Electronics after a report by the Reuters news agency said the company could be implicated in forced-labor practices targeting Uyghur Muslim workers in...

Many view Chinese and Western approaches to AI regulation as oil and water. While significant differences exist, there is more overlap than one might think. As the U.S. considers its own approach, we may see more agreement and less technological balkanization.

We frequently hear that CCOs must work to gain more business influence. We also hear that CCOs need to be not only technologically fluent, but must also champion analytics as well. While these singular solutions are helpful, they are far from comprehensive. And when reviewing the varied number of demands on the CCO’s office, it was never likely that one...

If you end up sitting across from the Department of Justice, defending the decisions you made about training, what are they going to ask you? What will they be looking for?

Environmental, social and governance reporting has come into its own as a discipline, with most companies now issuing sustainability reports. What’s the board’s and executive team’s role in ensuring that these reports are responsive to investor needs? An estimated 95 percent of the S&P 500 published detailed environmental, social and governance (ESG) sustainability reports in 2019. Most of these reports...