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This post concerns the rights and responsibilities of whistleblowers. I sit on the Department of Labor Whistleblower Protection Advisory Committee. These views are solely my own.

Within a week of my last day as a Deputy General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer for a Fortune 500 company and shortly before starting my VAP in academia, I testified before the House Financial Services Committee on the potential unintended consequences of the proposed Dodd-Frank whistleblower law on compliance programs. I blogged here about my testimony and the rule, which allows whistleblowers who provide original information to the SEC related to securities fraud or violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to receive 10 to 30 percent of the amount of the recovery in any action in which the Commission levies sanctions in excess of $1 million dollars. During my testimony in 2011, I explained to some skeptical members of Congress that:

…the legislation as written has a loophole that could allow legal, compliance, audit, and other fiduciaries to collect the bounty although they are already professionally obligated to address these issues. While the whistleblower community believes that these fiduciaries are in the best position to report to the SEC on wrongdoing…

SEC Chair Mary Jo White yesterday presented the keynote address, for the International Corporate Governance Network Annual Conference, “Focusing the Lens of Disclosure to Set the Path Forward on Board Diversity, Non-GAAP, and Sustainability.” The full speech is available here.    

In reading the speech, I found that I was talking to myself at various spots (I do that from time to time), so I thought I’d turn those thoughts into an annotated version of the speech.  In the excerpt below, I have added my comments in brackets and italics. These are my initial thoughts to the speech, and I will continue to think these ideas through to see if my impression evolves.  Overall, as is often the case with financial and other regulation, I found myself agreeing with many of the goals, but questioning whether the proposed methods were the right way to achieve the goals.  Here’s my initial take:   

Last fall, I posted some thoughts on the film Poverty Inc., which looked at the impact of foreign aid and business giving through programs like TOMS Shoes’ One for One initiative. 

Recently, I came across this discussion on Poverty Inc. by Bill Easterly (NYU Economics) and the film’s creators (Michael Matheson Miller and Mark Weber). I posted on one of Bill Easterly’s books here. 

In the discussion at NYU, I especially liked this quote from Michael Matheson Miller: “We tend to treat poor people as objects–as objects of our charity, objects of our pity, objects of our compassion.–instead of subjects…Poor people are not objects; they are subjects and they should be the protagonists in their own stories of development.” The personal story Mark Weber tells of his trip while he was studying at Notre Dame was moving, but you will have to watch the discussion to hear it, as it would be tough to summarize. Some of the audience questions are a bit long-winded, but I think the panel does a nice job deciphering and answering. 

The film’s trailer, the discussion, and the Q&A with the audience are all worth watching.

Film Trailer

Discussion

Q&A

My latest article on Cuba and the US is out. Here I explore corporate governance and compliance issues for US companies. In May, I made my third trip to Cuba in a year to do further research on rule of law and investor concerns for my current work in progress.

In the meantime, please feel free to email me your comments or thoughts at mnarine@stu.edu on my latest piece
Download Here

The abstract is below:

The list of companies exploring business opportunities in Cuba reads like a who’s who of household names- Starwood Hotels, Netflix, Jet Blue, Carnival, Google, and AirBnB are either conducting business or have publicly announced plans to do so now that the Obama administration has normalized relations with Cuba. The 1962 embargo and the 1996 Helm-Burton Act remain in place, but companies are preparing for or have already been taking advantage of the new legal exemptions that ban business with Cuba. Many firms, however, may not be focusing on the corporate governance and compliance challenges of doing business in Cuba. This Essay will briefly discuss the pitfalls related to doing business with state-owned enterprises like those in Cuba; the particular complexity of doing business in Cuba…

By now, I am sure all readers are aware of the horrific, hateful mass shooting that occurred in Orlando earlier this week.

If your social media feeds are anything like mine, it did not take long for politicians, pundits, and friends to politicize this tragedy. The tragedy was quickly used, by people all along the political spectrum, as evidence supporting their views on guns, religion, sexuality, and immigration. There is certainly a time and need for solutions, but there needs to be space to mourn. Orin Kerr (George Washington Law) summarized my thoughts well when he tweeted:

What could and should be done immediately after a tragedy? I am not entirely sure, but those who took steps to donate blood and financial resources should be commended.

Some local businesses also attempted to help. For example, it was reported that Chick-fil-A, which is famously closed on Sundays, cooked and gave away food to those waiting in line to donate blood. This is an admittedly small gesture, but at a time when our nation often seems hopelessly divided, I am thankful for…

On Wednesday, the EU finally outlined its position on conflict minerals. The proposed rule will affect approximately 900,000 businesses. As I have discussed here, these “name and shame” disclosure rules are premised on the theories that: 1) companies have duty to respect human rights by conducting due diligence in their supply chains; 2) companies that source minerals from conflict zones contribute financially to rebels or others that perpetuate human rights abuses; and 3) if consumers and other stakeholders know that companies source certain minerals from conflict zones they will change their buying habits or pressure companies to source elsewhere.

As stated in earlier blog posts, the US Dodd- Frank rule has been entangled in court battles for years and the legal wranglings are not over yet. Dodd-Frank Form SD filings were due on May 31st and it is too soon to tell whether there has been improvement over last year’s disclosures in which many companies indicated that the due diligence process posed significant difficulties.

I am skeptical about most human rights disclosure rules in general because they are a misguided effort to solve the root problem of business’ complicity with human rights abuses and assume that consumers care…

The New York Times ran the article How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions last weekend. It’s an interesting piece that provides a look at Donald Trump’s east coast casino experience.  The article is, as one might expect, critical of his dealings and notes that Trump made money even when his ventures when bankrupt.  

Though I will not defend any of Trump’s dealings, there are few issues raised that I think are worthy of a some discussion and clarification.1  The post that follows suggests how to consider Trump’s business history and place that history in a political context.

I have been following Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on grit for well over a year, so I was eager to read her new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I bought and read a book within a few weeks of it being published.  

The book is an easy read, written for a for a popular audience, and I was able to finish it in three relatively short sittings.

Below, I reflect on the book, hopefully in a balanced way. 

Thesis. As may be evident from previous posts of mine, I like Duckworth’s thesis – essentially, that passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals are important in achieving success. Duckworth is careful to caveat her thesis, noting at hard work and passion are important, but are not the only factors that matter in achieving success. With this caveat, her thesis seems rather obvious and uninteresting.

Grit Scale. The Grit Scale Duckworth created for her studies seems easy to fake, and to her credit, she admits that it can be faked, like most self-reporting measures. Given the ability to fake the Grit Scale, I am not sure that it would be of much…

I recently finished Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016) by Angela Duckworth (Penn Psychology).

Next week, I will post some reflections on the contents of the book, but for now, I would like to discuss professors publishing for a popular audience. Tongue-twisting alliteration unintended.  

I am thankful that Duckworth wrote this book for a popular audience rather than in a way that would target a narrow slice of academia. Even as a professor myself, I find books written for popular audience easier to digest, especially if in a different discipline. While popular press books often oversimplify, I would rather a professor author a popular press book on her studies (and studies in her field) than have a journalist attempt to explain them. Also, while a popular press book may oversimplify, professors tend to be intentional about avoiding claims that are too sweeping. Note that in this interview, like the book, Duckworth is careful to state that grit is not the only thing that contributes to success. Finally, especially when the professor has done the background academic work first, as Duckworth did in many peer-reviewed journal articles, a popular press book can reach more people and inspire change and may…

Donald Trump was in my home state of West Virginia recently, and he promised to bring back coal jobs: 

And West Virginia. And we’re going to get those miners back to work. I’ll tell you what. We’re going to get those miners back to work . . . 

Let me tell you, the miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania which was so great to me last week and Ohio and all over, they’re going to start to work again. Believe me. You’re going to be proud again to be miners.

How he plans to do this is not clear, but part of it will be to attack the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.  Okay, but that’s a relatively recent development, and was certainly not the cause of the decline in coal production since the last production peak in 2008. The primary cause: cheap and abundant natural gas from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. 

In my former home state of North Dakota, Trump was telling voters he would rescind President Obama’s climate change rules and work to make the Keystone XL pipeline a reality to ship petroleum from Canada’s oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.  Further, Trump has stated that he would relax regulations…