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Showing posts from April, 2012

The Safe Deposit Box: Creating a Financial Wikileaks

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If you were a bank employee with information about wrongdoing in your division, would you be happy to approach your senior management about it? The Whistleblower Improvement Act of 2011 would require just that, making financial whistleblowers report their concerns to company management rather than approaching government agencies directly. The act has been backed by Rep. Michael Grimm, a former FBI agent who spent a couple years undercover trying to bust dodgy stock brokerages for securities fraud. You’d think that experience would make him attuned to the problems of financial crime, but Michael Smallberg of POGO argues that “Rep. Grimm’s legislation would hobble SEC and CFTC enforcement, chill the flow of high-quality insider tips, imperil the safety and livelihood of whistleblowers, and give law-breaking companies an accountability escape hatch”. I don't know enough about the proposed legislation to hold any definite views, but in any case  GovTrack reckons that there’s only a 2...