The clear lesson for the compliance practitioner from the Madoff employees’ trial testimony to-date is that there cannot be one person or the ubiquitous ‘rogue employee’ who decides to engage in bribery and corruption. There has to be more than one person. To circumvent a company’s internal controls takes work. For in any criminal FCPA enforcement matter, it is because the company involved had such weak internal controls that such circumvention could occur in the first place. But more than this circumvention, it means that the company did not employ sufficient systems to detect such bribery and corruption. And if the documentation you are reviewing is cold to the touch that may now constitute a red flag.
