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.
