Listen to the Whistle Blow
May 1, 2006 | Filed Under Regulation, Compliance, In the News
Can you hear it?
The news media is tracking the issue of what companies are doing to balance the orderly administration of compliance programs with federal laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
And the take is somewhat anti-business; consider this treatment of arbitration provisions:
Another tactic firms are using is to require employees to sign contracts that compel any who exhaust the Labor Department’s process to submit allegations of Sarbanes-Oxley violations to binding arbitration rather than filing suit in federal court.
A year after the law was passed, Salomon Smith Barney, the brokerage arm of Citigroup, won its bid to force into arbitration a former research analyst who claimed he was fired for refusing to alter a research report. The allegation clearly is covered by Sarbanes-Oxley, the court held, but that doesn’t override the contract the worker signed agreeing to arbitration.
There’s a fine line between encouraging employees to bring forward concerns and having some reasonable chance to hear about it and correct any issues before the Feds come knocking on the door.
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