An annual report on corporate scandals has been released, and the finance industry hasn't escaped unscathed
The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) today released their 4th annual corporate scandal calendars.
Guess who didn’t escape an appearance on the calendar? The finance industry.
The 2014 edition includes an additional $30bn in finalized settlements, fines, and other penalties since the release of its 2013 calendar. Already well-known scandals such as the Deepwater Horizon, Tyco, Enron, and Olympus are joined by the Mortgage Meltdown, LIBOR, insider trading, NewsCorp, and many more.
The calendar offers compliance and ethics professionals helpful news hooks for employee communications, reminders of teachable moments, and provides reference points for illustrations of past wrong doing.
"The Corporate Scandal Calendar, or Scalendar as we call it, wasn't created to point fingers," said SCCE and HCCA CEO Roy Snell. "It's there to demonstrate first, how expensive non-compliance is as compared to the cost of investing in an effective compliance program. Second, it helps compliance officers drive home to management and employees that any company, and any individual could go wrong, and when they do the price is extraordinarily high."
Each year the SCCE and HCCA review headlines and identify key dates in corporate scandals: arrests, indictments, and resolutions, whether a conviction or settlement. Key dates are then included in the calendar.
The 2014 calendar includes notes on January 7, when in 2013 banks agreed to $18.9bn in settlements to resolve federal allegations of mortgage wrongdoing.
April 17 is also noted as when Bank of America reached a $500m settlement in 2013 with investors over Countrywide debt. And May 2 is recognized as when Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs began making $247m in payments in settlement over foreclosure abuse allegations last year.
"We don't intend for this to be comprehensive, covering every milestone on every incident," said Snell. "Instead we want to capture the key dates that can help provide teachable moments."
