Just a few random thoughts jotted down after a whirlwind three days last week…

Are budgets really that bad? I’ve been assuming for nearly a year that budget increases and job openings went out of style with Bear Stearns. Imagine my surprise, then, at one gathering of about 15 chief compliance officers and two Justice Department officials—and as conversation went around the room, all 15 reported stable or slightly increased budgets, a smattering had job openings, and none said their CEOs or boards were giving them a hard time about the expense of compliance. Yes, it’s possible that most of the 15 were there because they’d had run-ins with the government before, and thus have stronger claims on company resources. But overall, concerns about budgets were quite tempered.

How loud should tone at the top be? We’ve all heard ad nauseam that tone at the top of a company is the paramount concern regulators have about the effectiveness of a corporate compliance program. That’s fine, but compliance officers still don’t know how harsh that tone should be. At least three times, I heard attendees ask various keynote speakers, Justice Department officials and other regulators whether it’s important to fire an errant employee right away.

Nobody gave a clear answer to that question. Still, the plain truth is that firing an executive the day you learn of an offense is one tone; conducting a long investigation and then sending him off with a seven-figure severance package is quite another. Ultimately, that latter course might be the more prudent to fend off civil litigation—but it might not impress investigators looking for a strong anti-corruption tone. I could be wrong on that; I don’t know. Apparently, nobody else does either. 

Lots of stealth accounting issues lie ahead. Russ Golden, technical director for the Financial Accounting Standards Board, gave an overview of new accounting issues that made my head spin. Three new standards coming out this month? All accounting standards boiled into the new Accounting Standards Codification by July 1? That alone could fill an hour; instead, Golden squeezed Codification—a profound change for all accounting executives—into the final three minutes of his talk.

Likewise for U.S. adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. Yes, regulators have put IFRS adoption on the slow boat these days, but the top financial reporting guys at Microsoft and Eli Lilly gave a fascinating talk about their challenges just in mapping out what their financial reports in IFRS would look like—nevermind the Herculean task of actually getting those reports assembled. If this is a formidable project for the largest companies in the United States, one can only imagine what IFRS adoption means for the rest of us.

Keep everything in perspective. One of my most memorable conversations happened, as they usually do, in my taxi ride to the airport to fly home. My driver was from Sudan, doing some studies here before flying of to Dubai for some job he’d lined up over there. His take on life in the United States: “Sure things are bad, and the jobs are going away, but you still have the best country in the world. Anyone who complains or breaks the law—you just leave them in Sudan for three months. When they come home, they’ll kiss the ground here and never do anything wrong again.”

Words for all of us to live by.