Compliance During COVID-19
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kara Brockmeyer, a partner in Debevoise & Plimpton's Washington office and former Chief of the SEC's FCPA Unit, discusses some changes she's observed in the implementation of compliance programs with much of the world in lockdown. She also describes the pace of investigations now that DOJ and SEC lawyers are working remotely and she wraps up with a few predictions about what we might see in this field post-pandemic.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. |
| 0:09.2 | I'm Alexandra Raghi. |
| 0:10.9 | My guest today is Kara Brockmeyer, formerly with the SEC and now with Debevoice in their |
| 0:15.2 | Washington, D.C. office, and she's a repeat offender on this podcast. |
| 0:19.6 | And we are going to discuss the impact on compliance, |
| 0:22.8 | particularly anti-bribery compliance at this time of COVID-19. So thank you so much for joining me. |
| 0:28.9 | It's my pleasure, Alexandra. It's always fun to talk with you. |
| 0:31.7 | Why don't you start with your broad overview, your impression of the impact that COVID-19 is having on the anti-bribery compliance |
| 0:41.4 | community first, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the enforcement agencies. |
| 0:46.1 | One of the biggest challenges is to figure out for compliance in a world that has basically |
| 0:51.7 | gone topsy-turvy where there are existential issues, |
| 0:54.8 | sometimes facing companies, how compliance on the ABC side fits into that and how you can |
| 1:01.5 | keep pushing forward the things that need to get done while recognizing that the business people |
| 1:06.3 | that you may need to talk with have other competing and very serious issues that they're daily with. |
| 1:12.7 | And this is, you know, we are really in uncharted waters. We've never had basically the entire |
| 1:16.7 | developed world shutdown before. Are you seeing companies really struggling to get the attention |
| 1:22.5 | of the business community, not companies generally, but their compliance departments? |
| 1:26.8 | I think what we have seen is that |
| 1:28.7 | I think compliance people just need to be a little bit sensitive to the fact that you maybe not be |
| 1:34.5 | able to get the same level of attention from, for example, senior executives now if they're dealing |
| 1:40.8 | with very serious business issues because the workforce is shut down or there's layoffs or things like that for companies that are really affected by the stay-at-home nature of people's lives today. And I think it's really just, there's a lot of things that are just continuing as normal, like as we talked about, for many compliance officers that I talked to, they're incredibly busy. Their day-to-day hasn't actually changed that much because a lot of |
| 2:01.4 | things can move forward. But there may be some things where you have to be a little bit more |
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