Tag Archives: whistleblowers

Covering Up Whistleblowers’ Disclosures Should Be Illegal

Posted on August 22, 2016 by William Black | 4 comments

By William K. Black
August 22, 2016 Kansas City, MO

James Stewart has written a column about Roger Ailes’ alleged sexual predation on female Fox News personnel over the course of many years. He entitled it “Secrecy of Settlements at Fox News Hid Bad Behavior.” Ailes was the CEO of Fox News. I write to show how two concepts Stewart did not employ would aid the analysis and to suggest a fundamental change in the law that would make the world a far better place.

The two concepts I add to Stewart’s analysis are “control fraud” and whistleblowing. Stewart’s column applies as its sole lens sexual harassment. That is the obvious lens to employ and it is helpful. By supplementing this lens, however, we can provide additional useful insights and frame generalized policies of broader applicability.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged sexual harassment, whistleblowers

The CEO’s Great Advice About Whistleblowers Never Mentions Them

Posted on August 21, 2016 by William Black | 3 comments

By William K. Black
August 22, 2016 Kansas City, MO

The New York Times has a columnist who interviews business leaders. He interviewed, Bracken Darrell, Logitech’s CEO in a column entitled “Be Sure to Tell the Boss What’s Wrong.” When we, the co-founders of Bank Whistleblowers United, here a phrase like that our ears perk up. It is exactly the right message the CEO should send. The people who most obviously take that message to heart, in the most difficult circumstances for the employee and where following the CEO’s advice is most vital to the firm, are whistleblowers. Despite the title of the article, and the famous role that whistleblowers played in disclosing the frauds that drove the most recent financial crisis, however, the CEO never mentioned whistleblowers. The entirety of the discussion of basis for the title of the article is shown below.

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Tagged nyt, whistleblowers

Corporate CEOs Demand that they be Tipped Off When a Whistleblower Reports their Crimes

Posted on April 26, 2014 by William Black | 3 comments

By William K. Black

I’m writing on the flight returning from the XII^th International CIFA Forum in Monaco. CIFA is an NGO. It is a confederation of independent financial advisor organizations that works with the UN in promoting the protection of investors. This means that their clients are often very wealthy and that many of the participants are speakers are very conservative or libertarians (or an admixture). One of the speakers, Dr. Hans Geiger, gave an impassioned denunciation of “bureaucrats” (which turned out to mean anyone who worked for the government) and the imposition of a duty on bankers to file criminal referrals when they had a “reasonable suspicion” that their clients had committed certain crimes. The official U.S. jargon for a criminal referral is “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SARS). Geiger was particularly distressed that the banker would not be allowed to inform his client that he was making the criminal referral (which FATF terms “Suspicious Transaction Reports” (STRs)) under the standard 21 proposed by the Financial Action Task Force in 2012.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, Control Fraud, dodd-frank, Financial Action Task Force, whistleblowers

Why are there no famous financial whistleblowers in this crisis?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Devin Smith | 6 comments

By William K. Black

This column discusses one of the more subtle issues raised by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) civil fraud action against Bank of America (B of A). The issue was so subtle that of the three articles about the lawsuit that I choose to review the night after the suit was filed, only the NYT article mentioned one of the most important aspects of the suit – the key role that the whistleblower played in making the action possible. The AP and the WSJ articles ignored the fact.

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