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Why I Did Not Go To Jail

bhorowitz.com

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Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#131

Post by garric »

ecuzzillo wrote: post #101
gohrt wrote: post #42

This looks one of those cases that could have gone like this: "Someone proposed an idea that was perhaps technically legal, but obviously failed the sniff test of ethics and spirit of the law. I reminded her of what I repeatedly tell our staff at welcome/training meetings: At this company, we do what is right, for our employees, our customers, our investors, and the public. We don't mislead one to help another. We do…

There are a lot of things that I think are morally completely correct that I still wouldn't necessarily be the happiest to see on the NYT.

Unless you give an example that includes your rationale, we're not able to judge one way or the other.

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#132

Post by sumanthvepa »

clarkevans wrote: post #86
pjungwir wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bit OT, but I saw something similar once where the head of QA reported to the director of development. So the guy in charge of QA's annual raise/bonus/etc was himself compensated based on hitting release deadlines. I wonder how people here would have set that up differently.

One approach is to have Quality Control report to the Product Manager, who reports to Business Development. This might be doubly beneficial since it could help reign in promises that don't align with proven product direction. Also, what many companies call "QA" is really just QC, that is, checking the outputs. Quality Assurance is focused the production process itself, that developers are properly trained and that de…

One approach I've seen at Microsoft is to have Product Management, Engineering and QA report to the General Manager. It seemed like a very good solution to empowering QA. I'm guessing that structure evolved because of the need to ensure that Windows worked on a vast variety of plaforms.

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#133

Post by jessedhillon »

smsm42 wrote: post #51

What I take from this story is that the financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional. The author's council could have given him "yes" answer as easily as "no" answer - many other lawyers obviously did since 200 companies got "yes" answers from their councils. And he'd never known anything was wrong. Basically, one can becom…

Oh, woe be the accountants!

It's difficult to take this opinion seriously when the comment author is so unread about the law that they don't know the difference between "council" and "counsel"! It's a very strong opinion which is devoid of any learning or context whatsoever -- has the author never heard of Arthur Andersen?

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#134

Post by mattdeboard »

jessedhillon wrote: post #133
smsm42 wrote: post #51

What I take from this story is that the financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional. The author's council could have given him "yes" answer as easily as "no" answer - many other lawyers obviously did since 200 companies got "yes" answers from their councils. And he'd never known anything was wrong. Basically, one can becom…

Oh, woe be the accountants! It's difficult to take this opinion seriously when the comment author is so unread about the law that they don't know the difference between "council" and "counsel"! It's a very strong opinion which is devoid of any learning or context whatsoever -- has the author never heard of Arthur Andersen?

Did you really just write 40ish words belittling someone's opinion because they picked the wrong homophone?

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#135

Post by jessedhillon »

smsm42 wrote: post #75
ganeumann wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between going to your general counsel and asking "Is this legal?" and going to your accountants and saying "Find me a way to make this legal enough." I think the options-backdating was an example of the latter.

In the case described in the story, I don't see any signs of the former. The CFO proposes certain practice, it is not obviously illegal (like not paying taxes or stealing office supplies from competitors at night), hundreds of companies do it, hundreds of lawyers approve it. If the CEO asks the council if it's OK and the council says yes, like hundreds others did, he goes to jail. If he's lucky and the council says n…

In the case described in the story, I don't see any signs of the former.

Good thing we have more than just a blog post on the options backdating scandal, as it's a well-known scandal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_backdating#Overview_...

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/regulation/20...

Options backdating was a big fucking deal a few years ago.

The CFO proposes certain practice, it is not obviously illegal (like not paying taxes or stealing office supplies from competitors at night)

It's not obviously illegal to lie about the date on which you granted an employee his/her options?

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#136

Post by jessedhillon »

mattdeboard wrote: post #134
jessedhillon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, woe be the accountants! It's difficult to take this opinion seriously when the comment author is so unread about the law that they don't know the difference between "council" and "counsel"! It's a very strong opinion which is devoid of any learning or context whatsoever -- has the author never heard of Arthur Andersen?

Did you really just write 40ish words belittling someone's opinion because they picked the wrong homophone?

I concluded that someone who can't distinguish counsel and council has probably not read a lot about legal issues, and probably has an uninformed opinion on them. So it's probably not meaningful when they decide that government and law enforcement are like an angry, unpredictable gorilla.

What would you conclude?

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#138

Post by [deleted] »

garric wrote: post #131
ecuzzillo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that I think are morally completely correct that I still wouldn't necessarily be the happiest to see on the NYT.

Unless you give an example that includes your rationale, we're not able to judge one way or the other.

[deleted]

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#139

Post by morganw »

smsm42 wrote: post #51

What I take from this story is that the financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional. The author's council could have given him "yes" answer as easily as "no" answer - many other lawyers obviously did since 200 companies got "yes" answers from their councils. And he'd never known anything was wrong. Basically, one can becom…

> financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional.

The CFO of the little company I worked for in the mid&late 90's said her colleagues were calling FAS 123 (draft in 1993, revised in 2004) stock option accounting guidelines from FASB the "aircraft carrier" document because of its size. The PDF http://www.fasb.org/pdf/fas123.pdf is only a little over 100 pages, but it's some dense dense stuff and I'd guess 10x that length has been written in interpretations.

Re: Why I Did Not Go To Jail

#140

Post by smsm42 »

deong wrote: post #123
smsm42 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case described in the story, I don't see any signs of the former. The CFO proposes certain practice, it is not obviously illegal (like not paying taxes or stealing office supplies from competitors at night), hundreds of companies do it, hundreds of lawyers approve it. If the CEO asks the council if it's OK and the council says yes, like hundreds others did, he goes to jail. If he's lucky and the council says n…

I'm not sure that conclusion is warranted. Here's what we know: 1. Loads of companies were doing it. 2. When this company wanted to do it, their counsel said it was illegal, so they didn't. Given those facts, we can't say that the other 200 companies were simply flummoxed by a too-complex regulatory framework. They may just have well had their own meetings and said, "This looks fishy, but everyone else is doing it, a…

I'm not saying it was arbitrary from regulator's side. I am saying it would be arbitrary for you because you won't know if you're in the wrong or not.

>>> but when you're making C-level salaries, I'm sorry but you're expected to figure out if you're committing a crime or not.

I'm not sure how it has anything to do with the salary. I'm sure whichever lawyers OKed this practice - and I would find it very hard to believe hundreds of companies would just decide to wing it without asking a lawyer - I'm sure they were paid enough. They just thought it'd be OK, but they were wrong. How the salary helps to deal with that? Unless you're claiming the salary is just compensation for the possibility of being jailed for something you have no idea you were doing wrong. In which case I'd prefer a system with more transparent laws and lower CEO salaries.

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