The Lesson of Enron

ON THE RECORD

he take-away from Enron is that ethics and compliance professionals have a terribly important job to do, and there’s a lot more to be done. They still don’t really have the power to say no to a CEO or CFO. Compliance and ethics professionals need to be beholden to the board, not to senior management. They need to be empowered and protected. They ought to have employment agreements that cannot be terminated without the audit committee’s signing off. And audit committees ought to be recruiting compliance officers from other companies as members.”

—Joseph E. Murphy, partner, Compliance Systems Legal Group,
remarks at The Conference Board Ethics and
Compliance Conference, New York, May 11.