Tag Archives: Daniel R. Alonso

Resisting Temptation in a Crisis: Making Sure Ethics and Compliance Don’t Get Diluted Under Financial Strain

by Daniel R. Alonso, Tiffany A. Archer, Richard Bistrong, Bruce Karpati, and Katherine A. Lemire

As the pandemic crisis begins its long process of receding, near the top of mind in companies of all sizes is how to thrive, or even survive, with the economy in turmoil. With such pressures, it would be easy for business executives to let compliance issues drop down on their list of priorities. Although good compliance professionals will resist any loosening of the reins, they need to be realistic that their resources will be more limited than in the past. At the same time, compliance issues and breaches could even be worse during the pandemic and its aftermath, in light of, to cite just one example, governments’ relaxing their procurement rules to make emergency relief easier to achieve. And, once the brunt of the crisis is over, businesses will likely see spikes in sales, which could in turn lead to additional issues or breaches.

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What Does It Mean to be a Monitor? (Revisited)

by Daniel R. Alonso

In a post on this site last fall, Prof. Veronica Root asked “What Does It Mean to be a Monitor?”[1] The point of her piece was to explain how the term “monitor” describes a number of activities and assignments that can be quite different from one another. Prof. Root’s post faithfully described different monitorship models, from court-ordered monitorships to corporate compliance monitorships. But the otherwise excellent post did not touch on a key piece of the monitorship puzzle—proactive monitorships, created in the absence of an action or settlement as a prophylactic against wrongdoing—without which any discussion of monitorships is incomplete.

Proactive monitors, sometimes called “integrity monitors” or in some contexts “independent private sector inspectors general,” play an important and growing role in the world of monitorships. A recent high-profile example is New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin’s open letter to President-elect Donald Trump, in which he suggested that if Mr. Trump did not place his assets in a blind trust, one way for him to ease concerns about potential conflicts of interest posed by his business empire would be to engage a corporate monitor to examine and report on such conflicts.[2] Such a monitor would, of course, have to be “truly independent.”[3]

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