Why It’s Important to Know Who the Victims of Corruption Are
One of the more complex and instructive business scandals of the 1980s concerned fraud in the sale of specialty pipe.
Entries by Jeffrey Kaplan
Will Working at Home Make Us More Ethical?
Research I reported on several years ago suggests working from home could make a positive ethical difference.
Understanding Behavioral Ethics Can Strengthen Your Compliance Program
Behavioral ethics is a well known field of social science which shows—due to various cognitive biases—“how we are not as ethical as we think.” Practitioners of behavioral compliance and ethics (C&E), which is less well known, use behavioral-ethics insights to develop and maintain effective compliance programs. How do they do that? This should be viewed on two levels. […]
Being a Parent as a Source of Ethics Risk
In 1973, in speaking to colleagues on the Cook County Democratic Committee, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago defended his having directed a million dollars of insurance business to an agency on behalf of his son John with the immortal words: “If I can’t help my sons, then [my critics] can kiss my ass. I make […]
Socialism and Conflicts of Interest
There was a time in my life when I might have embraced the cause of socialism, but that was many years ago, and today I proudly march under the banner of centrism. And the current flirtation with socialism in the U.S. has me worried—at least a little bit. My concern is not that the […]
Featured Collaborator for April: Jeffrey Kaplan
Interview with Jeffrey Kaplan, partner in the Kaplan & Walker LLP law firm in Princeton, New Jersey
What are your main areas of research /writing?
I am principally a practitioner – in the compliance and ethics (“C&E”) field – rather than a professional researcher, and I certainly have not conducted any experimental research. I have done survey research – for the Conference Board (on the role of corporate directors in promoting C&E and on shortfalls in US government enforcement policy vis a vis C&E) and for the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (the “ECI,” which used to be called the ECOA) on conflicts of interest and various C&E program practices. Also, for the past four years I have been assembling and analyzing cases and articles about conflicts of interest (“COIs”) for a blog which looks at various COI issues across varying industry contexts (e.g., what types of interests are cognizable for COI purposes or when should a waiver be permitted) I hope at some point to turn these posts into a book about all things COI-related.
Is Political Ideology a Compliance and Ethics Risk?
Cross posted with permission from ES Collaborator Jeffrey Kaplan’s Conflict of Interest blog
In a post last week on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Danling Jiang, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University, summarizes a recent article she authored with Irena Hutton, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University; and Alok Kumar, Professor of Finance at the University of Miami: “Political Values, Culture, and Corporate Litigation,” which was published in the latest issue of Management Science and which “examine[s] whether the political culture of a firm defines its ethical and legal boundaries as observed by the propensity for corporate misconduct.”
In a post last week on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Danling Jiang, Associate Professor of Finance at Florida State University said of recent research, “Using one of the largest samples of litigation data to date, [they] show that firms with Republican culture are more likely to be the subject of civil rights, labor, and environmental litigation than Democratic firms, consistent with the Democratic ideology that emphasizes equal rights, labor rights, and environmental protection. However, firms with Democratic culture are more likely to be the subject of litigation related to securities fraud and intellectual property rights violations than Republican firms whose Party ideology stresses self-reliance, property rights, market discipline, and limited government regulation.”
This is interesting – if not necessarily surprising – stuff, and particularly so in an election year. But does it bear on the work of C&E professionals? And does it have anything to do with conflicts of interest?
Point-of-Risk Compliance
This piece is cross posted from ES collaborator Jeffrey Kaplan‘s “Conflicts of Interest” blog with permission.
Marketers have long known that “point-of-sale” display of products can be a powerful advertising tool. But can its logic be put to work for promoting compliance and ethics?
I was recently asked by a client to fill out a vendor information form and noticed that in addition to seeking information from vendors the form required the employee proposing the hiring to certify that any conflict of interest involving the vendor had been disclosed and okayed by management and the C&E officer. While I know that many companies have some form of COI certifications (see prior posts), I can’t recall having seen one on a vendor information form of this sort before – even though the common sense of such a “point-of-risk” compliance approach seems pretty obvious. Indeed, it is hard to think of any reason why a company wouldn’t do this.
Conflicts of interest, corruption and fraud: what are the connections?
[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog] Whether one is drafting a code of conduct or other C&E policy documents, developing training, designing audit protocols, conducting a risk or program assessment or creating C&E metrics, it may be useful to bear in mind the relationships between COIs, corruption and fraud – particularly given […]
Is Wall Street a bad ethical neighborhood?
[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog] For many years I taught ethics in the executive MBA program of a New York area business school. Because of the school’s location, the “day job” for many of the students was in the financial services field, and on average they seemed less ethics-focused than […]