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Companies Ignore Whistle-blower Protections

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Whistle-blowers are in the news more and more, but some organizations don’t seem to have caught up with the trend, or the fact that retaliation is illegal. They don’t seem to realize that negative reactions to a whistle-blower can make them look petty—and guilty.

Take two front page stories in our area newspaper on the same day this week. Both were about whistle-blowers who put their jobs on the line to come forward. One was fired, the other was suspended and later resigned.

In one case, The Journal News reported, a member of a New York town’s financial staff, the supervisor of fiscal services for more than 10 years, testified at a hearing that she notified several of her superiors that the town’s revenue projections were overestimated—on a financial statement needed for a bond application. She also reported improper money transfers—one made to the town supervisor. The woman was ignored, told to keep quiet, and eventually fired.

Not only did the town officials make no move to right the wrongs she reported to them, one official denied ever being told of potential corruption or fraud. Meanwhile, the town, which is also being investigated by the FBI, has filed perjury and other charges against this former employee.

The second newspaper article is about a former security expert at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York. Because he feared the plant was vulnerable to a terrorist attack, he voiced his concerns to supervisors. In June he was suspended.

He filed a 76-page lawsuit in the U.S. District Court alleging misconduct and retaliation against him. The Indian Point employee alleged that security was inadequate and that documents and internal reports were falsified.

Unfortunately these sound like other stories in the news over the past few years following the financial crisis. At Lehman Brothers, the company’s chief risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic warned Dick Fuld, the CEO, that their risk in mortgage-backed security bets was too great. Her warnings were ignored. Her reward was to be fired.

The knee-jerk reaction of many organizations seems to be; get rid of the employee, blame the employee and then go to court. It appears that the whistle-blower protections under the Dodd-Frank Act, such as prohibiting retaliation against whistle-blowers, is still a mystery to some organizations.

Fraud experts contend that the burden is on the organization to see that employees are comfortable in coming forward and that their concerns are addressed. They advise companies to have hotlines available for employees to provide whistle-blower tips—and to act on those tips.

Whether or not a company is guilty of fraud, firing an employee for coming forward can make the organization look guilty and cause a whole host of other problems, including risk to the company’s reputation. Public entities and corporations would do well to study Dodd-Frank and put a plan in place before an employee does come forward. Have organizations learned nothing from Watergate? The cover-up always leads to exposure of the crime.

RMORSA: Risk Culture and Governance

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The National Association of Insurance Commissioners adoption of the Risk Management and Own Risk and Solvency Assessment Model Act (RMORSA) requires insurance organizations to take a broader approach to risk management. As U.S. insurers begin to mobilize their efforts to comply with the regulation by the 2015 deadline, it’s important for them to take a step back, leverage their existing risk management operations, and develop their RMORSA efforts with a mind to the future.

The groundwork for RMORSA was laid with International Association of Insurance Supervisors’ (IAIS) Core Principle 16 – Enterprise Risk Management – and much of the ORSA requirements can be fulfilled with the adoption of an ERM framework that addresses:

• Risk culture and governance

• Risk identification and prioritization

• Risk appetite and tolerances

• Risk management and controls

• Risk reporting and communication

Before you scoff at the scope of these requirements, consider that the ORSA Guidance Manual stipulates that insurers with appropriately developed ERM frameworks “may not require the same scope or depth of review” as organizations with less defined processes.

As defined by the NAIC, risk culture and governance defines roles, responsibilities, and accountability in risk-based decision making. In effect, the principle builds off of a 2010 SEC mandate requiring corporate boards to document their role overseeing enterprise risk. This rule extends the board’s role in risk oversight from C-level risks, activities and decisions to now having accountability at the business process level. Boards are explicitly given a choice between either having effective risk management, or disclosing their ineffectiveness to the public. Doing neither is considered fraud or negligence. Enforcement actions by the SEC have doubled in recent years, so it’s likely your board has already established risk management as a priority, but what does this mean for your organization?

The first practical issue is that it is no longer sufficient to rely on the audit function as a hub for risk management. Risk responsibility has always been the responsibility of process owners, and ORSA is now mandating better oversight under the guidance of a risk management function. For many organizations, the critical first step has been taken by establishing executive responsibility in a chief risk officer (a CRO is actually required to sign off on the ORSA assessment), but without the appropriate tools to make risk management actionable, accountability beyond the CRO is never properly defined. Front line managers hear “risk responsibility” and take the same action they would for other lofty strategic initiatives—that is to say, they take no action at all.

To engage process owners in a risk culture, each business area must take ownership for a subset of the enterprise risks.

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Risk managers, in effect, do not own the risks to the organization; on the contrary, they own the ERM process. Their primary role is to lay the groundwork for risk assessments, aggregate risk intelligence for board reports and create actionable initiatives for business areas in need of oversight.

Engaging process owners has the dual effect of permeating an enterprise-wide risk culture, while also creating a sense of shared responsibility. The structure defined above also creates three levels of defense, a concept adopted and well-articulated by the Institute of Internal Auditors. The operational risks are owned by the process owners. The risk management function provides guidance and strategic alignment.

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And finally, internal audit ensures adherence to the proper policies and regulatory standards.

Risk culture and governance cannot be accomplished overnight, but significant progress can be made by adopting and articulating the best practices outlined above.

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For more information on engaging process owners, implementing a standardized risk assessment process, and reporting this information to the board, download LogicManager’s complimentary eBook, Presenting Risk Management to the Board.

The Costs of Panda-monium

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Panda toddler

Friday evening, Washington, D.C. gained a new squealing, wriggling pink mass born for the spotlight. No, it’s not a fiery elected official filibustering on the House floor. It’s a 4.8-ounce baby panda. Approximately the size of a stick of butter, the as-yet-unnamed baby is already a rock star – and deservedly so.

Having grown up in D.C. – and become quite an animal-lover – I admit that I’m fully aboard the panda crazy train. But I’m far from alone. Pandas are a big business for American zoos, and one that does a lot of good.

Simply hosting giant pandas is a massive undertaking for American zoos. From constructing state-of-the-art habitats to administering round-the-clock care and monitoring the development and behavior, our wonderfully furry friends take a lot of care. On top of those basic infrastructure requirements, zoos must also pay to loan pandas from China, adding up to an average of $2.6 million per year per pair – and that’s if they don’t have a cub. With every baby panda born to an American zoo, officials must shell out an additional $600,000 in a one-time “baby tax” to the Chinese government. Add in the fact that almost half of successful panda pregnancies result in twins, and the bears might as well be eating green bills instead of bamboo.

Pandas cost about $500,000 to care for annually, according to Dennis Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, one of four American zoos that houses pandas. The zoo’s second most expensive animal, the elephant, require just one fifth as much.

According to the Washington Post, webcams following Tai Shan, the last baby panda raised at the National Zoo, generated 21 million hits in the first year alone. Merchandising sales at the zoo rose dramatically, from $1.7 million in the first half of 2005, before the cub was born, to $3.3 million in the first half of 2006. Tai Shan products accounted for 23 percent of that total. During the first three months the charismatic baby was on display to the public, zoo admission jumped by as much as 50 percent over previous years, National Geographic reported. In fact, while 13,000 timed entry tickets for the panda’s debut were disseminated for free, all were taken within two hours and a secondary market on the Internet charged up to $500 per ticket for the free zoo.

Baby pandas pay big.

After the excitement and devastating loss of a six-day-old panda last year, the National Zoo ramped up its breeding efforts with Mei Xiang, whose new cub is only the third birth for the 15-year-old female. Impregnating pandas in captivity is incredibly challenging, particularly since females only go into estrus about once a year. Baby panda fever began before conception in 2012, with zoo officials live-tweeting Mei Xiang’s artificial insemination procedure for an hour and a half. This time around, baby panda specialists were brought in from China, and two of the zoo’s staff members were sent to China for special training in the care of newborn cubs, the Washington Post reported. Veterinarians also got particularly proactive in their attempts to impregnate Mei Xiang, performing the procedure multiple time with fresh and frozen sperm samples from both the National Zoo’s male, Tian Tian, and the San Diego Zoo’s Gao Gao. As a precaution, officials and volunteers began round-the-clock pregnancy watch and closed the panda house on August 7, when Mei Xiang’s gestation period began to end.

Rigorous breeding programs protect zoos’ investment and capitalize on the potential fanfare over these remarkable and critically endangered animals. Most of the money zoos pay to loan pandas is sent to China to preserve panda habitats, create local environmental education programs near reserves, train conservation professionals, and run reserves that house most of the pandas currently in captivity. Since U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service policies were rewritten in 1998, in order to qualify for panda import permits, American zoos have to design research programs that benefit wild pandas and help China pay for its own panda projects, according to National Geographic. As Fish and Wildlife Service official Ken Stansell told the magazine, “We had to step back and find a way to use our permit process as a conservation tool.”

Zoos are matching the governmental commitment to conservation, and it’s clearly not only about preserving the bottom line. “Nobody would ever commit this kind of money to any other species,” said David Wildt, head of the National Zoo’s reproductive sciences program, in an interview with National Geographic.

TRIA: Not Just a Big City Issue

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The following is an excerpt from the RIMS executive report “Terrorism Risk Insurance Act: The Commercial Consumer’s Perspective.” The report is available for download here.

Opponents and skeptics of TRIA express concern that the program is tailored to benefit only major metropolitan cities such as New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.; however, major cities are not the only ar­eas facing the very real threat of terrorism, as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made evident. Additionally, while the recent attacks in Boston occurred in a major city, they did not occur in a major financial center or area that would be seen as exclusive to such a city. They occurred during a marathon race and city celebration; similar events take place throughout the country on almost a daily basis.

On January 31, 2012, the National Consortium for the Study of Ter­rorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) released its “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008” report to the Department of Homeland Security. This report found that more than 2,600 terrorist events, defined as “the threatened or actual use of il­legal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation,” occurred in the United States during those years.

On April 29, 2010, the Heritage Foundation published a list of thirty known terrorist plots that had been foiled in the United States following 9/11. These plot targets included a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio; gas pipelines in Wyoming; and a federal building in Springfield, Illinois. This again shows that major cities are not the only targets of terrorists.

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On September 8, 2011, The Daily Beast published 10 additional foiled plots that had occurred after April, 2010, one of which was a plot to target Christmas tree lighting in Portland, Oregon.19

These lists and studies are highlighted because they show that major cit­ies are not the only terrorist targets in the United States. Any venue that brings together a large group of people is a potential target for terrorism whether it be a sports venue, a hospital, a school or university, a large commercial building, a utility, place of worship or Christmas tree light­ing.

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Businesses and organizations, whether in New York or Columbus, Ohio, need adequate terrorism coverage and the market stability TRIA provides to manage that risk.