For chief compliance officers, compliance professionals, and even corporate legal types, the need to read the tea leaves around Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is at an end. All you need to do is listen to the public comments from SEC officials and you can see where enforcement is heading.
Unequivocally clear were the remarks by the SEC in its annual report to Congress on the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower Program, issued in November 2014; and more particularly the comments of Sean McKessy, chief of the SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower, at the SCCE 2014 Compliance and Ethics Institute. Both the report and McKessy talked about the issue of retaliation by corporations for employees who report securities violations to the SEC. They provided clear statements that the SEC had found situations where employee severance agreements and other types of confidentiality agreements attempted to prevent employees from coming forward to the SEC for fear of being sued and other forms of retaliation.
