Category Archives: Regulatory Risk

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New Approaches Needed for Effective Data Risk Management

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Over time, the role of corporate legal departments has expanded to address the increasing risks in corporations—from increasing involvement in implementing corporate policies to leading employee training on procedures for managing electronic communications, social media, and bring your own device (BYOD) policies. This shift, however, is not enough to meet the challenges posed by an increasing range of risks proliferating within global organizations. Legal and compliance groups must also take the lead in finding new ways to leverage the power inherent in their data and address the challenges posed by massive data stores, information and network security challenges, as well as regulatory compliance requirements.

Failings of Traditional Strategies

In the past, organizations used straightforward, people-intensive methods to search for and remediate risk. For example, organizations instituted policies training, hoping that it would be sufficient to corral employee use of electronic communications, BYOD, and social media. Some may have formed working groups or intradepartmental committees designed to consider the implications of data privacy or information security for their businesses. Others rely on basic technology, such as keyword searches, that trigger electronic alerts when they find a hit in a document.

While these tools are still important to demonstrate compliance, they are insufficient alone to monitor for risk.

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Older technology falls short when it comes to handling unstructured data, such as e-mail. For example, discerning employees will be too cautious to use triggering keywords such as “donations” or “bribes” when referring to illicit activity. Keywords are also notoriously inaccurate: if over-inclusive, they may yield a stockpile of irrelevant information, while under-inclusive keywords could omit critical documents from discovery.

Trends Drive New Risk Management Approaches

Three recent trends—escalations in data volumes, increasing threats to data privacy and security, and heightened regulatory scrutiny—highlight the need for more intensive means to investigate risk in organizations.

1-Burgeoning Data Stores

With today’s hyperfocus on information, risk follows data. The more data sources organizations have, and the more locations for storage of data, the greater the legal exposure.

Email is perhaps the most insidious source of risk, as hackers may look to exploit unwitting employees who may open spoofed e-mails containing malware or viruses designed to attack the corporate network. Along with e-mail, employees also have more ways than ever to share confidential corporate data such as trade secrets with outsiders. Newer forms of unstructured data, such as social media and instant messaging, allow people to disperse troubling information even more rapidly than before.

As more organizations look for low-cost storage for their data reserves, they have turned to the cloud—yet another source of potential risk to data privacy. Cloud providers may be susceptible to the same hacker schemes as employees. Moreover, depending on the terms of their service-level agreements, they could employ lax security protocols, lack disaster-recovery plans, share data with other clients, or transfer data to third parties, all without notifying the data owner. Furthermore, depending on the location of the cloud storage, it may trigger the application of international laws that protect data privacy and prevent the processing or transfer of a corporation’s data.

2-Data Privacy and Security

Traditional approaches to risk management are poorly equipped to meet the demands imposed by today’s data privacy and security regulations, particularly when it comes to the need to protect personally identifiable information, protected health information, nonpublic information, trade secrets, and privileged data.

This is especially true for global organizations, which are likely to have information cross international borders and trigger other nations’ data privacy schemes. Many nations have adopted restrictive schemes designed to protect their citizens’ personal information, such as the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, which controls when and how organizations can collect, process, store, alter, retrieve, and transmit this personal data. Many nations in the Asia-Pacific region have also created data privacy regimes, including China, which has blocking statutes that forbid the cross-border transfer of documents that contain “state secrets” as well as confidential commercial information.

Domestically, organizations must worry about laws such as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which extends the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to a covered entity’s third-party business associates. Under HIPAA’s Security Rule, organizations and their business associates must take reasonable measures to safeguard protected health information.

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Organizations must vigilantly monitor their data to ensure there are no gaps in security that would violate these rules.

3-Regulatory Enforcement

The nation’s regulatory framework is becoming more complex almost by the day. Regulations that supplement laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have generated new areas of vulnerability, particularly when it comes to third-party relationships.

For example, the current administration has taken the position that no FCPA infraction is too small to prosecute. Organizations that fail to take proactive measures to search for, disclose, and remediate misconduct are likely to face substantial penalties if a regulatory agency discovers misconduct. Traditional tools, such as internal audits, are not up to the task of detecting the malfeasance of internal fraudsters, who may mask their corrupt behavior with code words or other innuendo that make it difficult to discover using keywords. Unless more advanced tools are used, an organization’s best defense against fraud might be reliance on tipsters.

A similar approach is required to ensure compliance with ITAR. This law imposes stiff penalties, including millions in fines, against U.S. organizations that export “defense articles” without government authorization. “Articles” is defined so broadly that it covers technical, defense-related data in documents, blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, or instructions. The Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, the U.S. agency that enforces ITAR, is likely to take a more lenient approach with companies that have implemented a rigorous compliance program and that voluntarily disclose and remediate any failures.

Data-Driven Tools

Risk professionals now have a number of advanced analytics tools at their disposal to counteract the additional risks that lurk in emerging forms of data. Linguistic analysis techniques can identify instances where employees use seemingly innocuous words or phrases to engage in subterfuge. Concept clustering is a tool that isolates subtle patterns within documents that seem dissimilar to the untrained—or undigitized—eye. These conceptual search tools can identify patterns in documents, based on keywords or chunks of text, and flag the documents that refer to items that might fall within ITAR’s purview. Data visualization tools can analyze relationships and look for troubling connections that might violate the FCPA, such as links between employees, vendors, and foreign officials. In addition, anomaly detection tools can scan records for irregularities, such as unusual recurring payments.

Counsel, risk and compliance professionals can also apply tools such as technology-assisted review (TAR) to prioritize documents for review based on the likelihood that they contain material of concern. Using TAR, experienced legal counsel code a seed set of documents for relevancy to the issue at hand. Once done, they feed these documents into a computer that is programmed to uncover the logical reasoning behind the lawyers’ coding decisions. Sophisticated algorithms then apply that logic across an entire document population.

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The process is iterative, so that ultimately the computer’s logic closely mirrors the lawyers’ coding decisions. Organizations can use TAR to limit the population of documents for review, thus expediting the data mining process.

Navigating Data Breach Regulatory Requirements

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Amidst the gridlock on Capitol Hill and in State Houses across the country on many policy priorities, there seems to be one issue related to corporate governance that brings both parties together. In response to a tidal wave of security incidents, both policymakers and regulators are passing and debating new rules regulating how companies must respond to a data breach.

Along with managing internal expectations from the rest of the C-suite and board on how a data breach needs to be handled, risk managers now face a continually shifting regulatory landscape. It is essential that risk managers are up to speed on the latest policy developments and understand how they will influence how a company responds to an incident. In a policy white paper released by Experian, we found the following to be some of the most significant trends changing the regulatory landscape.

State Laws and Regulator Expectations 

Today, when a data breach occurs, risk management professionals need to take into account 49 different laws and regulations across states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The nuances between each law require careful review, especially for businesses that operates in multiple locations.

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Further complicating matters, many states are actively making updates to their laws:

  • Oregon recently signed a law requiring that notification of a data breach be provided to the state attorney general if a company experiences a breach that affects more than 250 consumers.
  • Connecticut added a requirement that companies provide credit monitoring for at least 12 months to impacted parties, as well as provide notice of a breach within 90 days of the incident’s discovery.
  • Rhode Island now requires consumer notice no later than 45 days after breach discovery and expanded the definition of personal information to include email addresses combined with passwords.
  • Illinois is considering legislation that would move the definition of personal information to include marketing data.

State attorneys general are also increasingly scrutinizing how companies respond to a data breach, and are often vocal if they think a company is not taking the proper steps to protect affected constituents. In addition to conducting more official investigations, state attorneys general are leveraging the power of the press to make their point.

Congress Looking to Reach Consensus

The current complexity caused by evolving state laws could soon become a non-issue if Congress is able to pass a comprehensive federal data breach notification bill. Lawmakers have made passing a national federal data breach and data security standard a priority in the current Congressional session. One bill, the Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2015, has already been passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and could make its way to a full vote. In the Senate, there are also a number of competing pieces of data breach legislation being debated that are fighting for support.

This is not the first time Congress has attempted to pass a comprehensive bill.

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Several bills were previously introduced and passed by House and Senate committees, but were unable to make it any further in the process due both to lack of support and not being high on the priority list. However, while reaching consensus may not come easy, there is pressure today on federal lawmakers to pass a bill, which is driving more action in the space.

Lending to the cause, President Obama is also a vocal advocate for a national uniform breach notification standard. He explicitly referenced the need for comprehensive legislation during his latest State of the Union Address, and gave a speech to the FTC in January 2015 that outlined his version of a draft data security bill – the Personal Data Notification and Protection Act. In addition to data breach law, recent high profile security incidents also led Obama to encourage Congress to pass legislation that regulates and supports voluntary sharing of cyber threat information between companies and the government. With attention and support from the executive branch on cyber security, it is much more likely we will see progress on the topic from Congress.

Staying Informed and Prepared

The reality is that data breaches pose a risk that will always need to be addressed, and until the U.S. passes comprehensive data breach notification legislation, the responsibility falls to risk managers and relevant colleagues to track policy changes. This is why it is important to enlist outside experts such as legal counsel familiar with the evolving regulatory landscape. Understanding the landscape is not enough, however. Companies must ensure that any new rules or regulatory agency expectations are accounted for and updated in data breach response plans. As a best practice, companies should review plans at least twice a year.

More information on data breach legislation and resources can be found at the Experian Data Breach Resolution website and the Experian Data Breach Resolution blog.

Defective Sidewalk Conditions: Who is at Fault?

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Liability between municipalities and landowners for injuries sustained by pedestrians due to defective sidewalk conditions has been the subject of lawsuits and statutory enactments for years. In California, municipalities generally own the sidewalks adjacent to private property owners’ land, but state law provides that the landowners are responsible for maintaining the sidewalk fronting their property in a safe and usable manner. According to Streets and Highways Code 5610:

“The owners of lots or portions of lots fronting on any portion of a public street or place when that street or place is improved or if and when the area between the property line of the adjacent property and the street line is maintained as a parking or a parking strip, shall maintain any sidewalk in such condition that the sidewalk will not endanger persons or property and maintain it in a condition which will not interfere with the public convenience…”

California state law provides that a municipality may assess landowners for the cost the municipality incurs to maintain sidewalks if the landowner fails to perform his/her duty. Although state law provides that abutting landowners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance and may be assessed the cost of repairs, they may not be liable for injuries or damages to third persons who use the sidewalk, unless the municipality enacts an ordinance that addresses liability. Williams v. Foster (1989). Williams arose after the plaintiff, Dennis Williams, tripped on a raised portion of the sidewalk in the City of San Jose, and thereafter sued the City. In its defense, San Jose argued that under 5610, the owner of the property fronting the sidewalk in question was solely liable.

Rejecting this contention, the court held that Foster (landowner) owed no legal duty at all to the injured plaintiff.

In reaching the Williams decision, the court held that imposing upon abutting owners a duty of care in favor of third persons “would require clear and unambiguous language,” which according to the court, is not contained in 5610. Notably, the court went on to state that the City “could have enacted an ordinance which expressly made abutting owners liable to members of the public for failure to maintain the sidewalk, but did not.” Following the Williams decision, the City of San Jose amended its sidewalk ordinance to include language similar to that suggested by the Williams Court.

In 2001, after adopting a sidewalk liability ordinance that addressed the issues raised in Williams, San Jose was sued by Joanne Gonzalez, who alleged she was injured when she tripped and fell over a raised portion on a public sidewalk. Gonzalez also sued Charles Huang, who owned the property adjacent to the sidewalk on which she fell.  Huang was sued on the theory that he had a common law duty to the plaintiff to maintain the sidewalk in a non-dangerous condition, as well as a duty under the San Jose Municipal Code.

The City of San Jose argued that the adjacent property owner was partially liable because he had not maintained the sidewalk as required by the local ordinance. Huang filed a motion for summary judgment arguing in part that the sidewalk liability ordinance enacted by the City of San Jose was unconstitutional. The trial court agreed with Huang and granted his Motion for Summary Judgment. Both Gonzalez and the City of San Jose appealed.

The case proceeded to the Court of Appeal which in 2004 ruled in San Jose’s favor.

  (Gonzales v. City of San Jose (2004.) The primary issue before the court was whether the state law preempted the local measure. The court found that the ordinance was constitutional and was not preempted by state law.

In its holding, the Gonzales court noted that cities are empowered under the California Constitution to enact ordinances and regulations deemed necessary to protect the public health, safety, and welfare, and that the City of San Jose’s ordinance was a permissible exercise of that power. Without such an ordinance, the court noted, landowners would have no incentive to maintain adjacent sidewalks in a safe manner.

The court emphasized that the ordinance did not serve to absolve the city of liability for dangerous conditions on city-owned sidewalks when the city created the dangerous condition, knew of its existence and failed to remedy it. Since the Gonzales ruling, many municipalities have considered liability shifting ordinances. Some have enacted such ordinances while others have not, oftentimes on public policy concerns.

Note that even in jurisdictions which have enacted liability shifting ordinances, one must determine the cause of the defective sidewalk condition. In many ordinances, liability does not shift to the landowner if the landowner did not cause the defective condition to exist.

Thus, in analyzing liability in a case involving an allegedly defective sidewalk condition, a major issue will be whether the municipality has a liability shifting ordinance. If such an ordinance exists, it must be read carefully to determine its scope, as each ordinance differs from municipality to municipality.

Cultivating a Reporting Culture

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While many organizations view whistleblowers as disgruntled employees looking for revenge and monetary rewards from the SEC, this is generally not the case, according to a recent study.

According to “Embracing Whistleblowers: Understand the Real Risk and Cultivate a Culture of Reporting,” by The Network, whistleblowers most often turn to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission only after they have tried reporting internally, or if they are concerned about retaliation by their company. In fact, only 20% ever reported to someone outside their company.

Organizations can do much to protect themselves, while also looking after employees. Since the majority of employees go to the company first with their concerns, organizations have an opportunity to address issues before regulatory involvement.

According to the report:

The fact that whistleblowers may prefer to keep things in the company doesn’t mean they won’t turn to the government or media if they think it necessary. Sixty-five percent of surveyed employees would be willing to report externally, “if my company didn’t do anything with my internal report.” An even higher percentage would report externally, “if keeping quiet would cause possible harm to people” or “if it was a big enough crime.”

How can companies manage this risk? By encouraging a strong “reporting culture,” they can learn about, and take care of potential problems through quality hotline reporting programs, The Network said.

Hotline programs have been around for years, but are more important than ever in today’s regulatory and business environment. Compliance teams should stop thinking of hotlines as purely telephonic; they’ve grown to include mobile and Web-based reporting solutions that give employees and others a safe and reliable way to raise their concerns internally via whichever method is most comfortable for them. They also give the compliance team important insight into what is going on inside the company.