Two late-year 2016 federal administrative and judicial pronouncements combine to raise concerns about the future of non-judicial dispute resolution fora. On November 28, 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”), a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, adopted rules which, among...
A recent FINRA administrative action against Merrill Lynch sanctioned the firm when “several hundred” customers of its Puerto Rico office invested in Puerto Rican government bonds and Puerto Rican closed-end funds, some using borrowed money and some buying on margin. When the value of the...
How is this as a “reward” for cooperation: you’re a financial institution who learns that some of your customers have violated the terms of their loan agreement with an affiliate and used borrowed funds to invest in the stock market, some even having invested on...
Five years after the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) established its Office of the Whistleblower, its whistleblower program has matured and seems rooted for the long term. Since inception, the Office has received more than 14,000 tips from around the world, which has increased annually...
Recent regulatory initiatives by state and financial industry regulators have added to the mushrooming legislation designed to protect elders from financial abuse. The latest of these, a Model Act to protect seniors, adopted in February 2016 by the 67 members of the North American Securities...
A recent series of articles and an editorial in the New York Times have re-ignited the debate about the fairness of private arbitration. While the current clamor is largely about class action arbitrations, and two recent Supreme Court decisions striking them down in arbitration (AT&T v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors),...
On October 15, 2015, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) proposed new rules and amendments to existing rules designed to combat elder abuse. The amendments will allow brokerage and investment firms to delay for up to 15 days the disbursement of funds or securities from the account...
The current pace of Dodd-Frank Act whistleblower awards should sound a clarion call to employers to do all they can to promote good corporate behavior and welcome employee concerns when raised. Doing so would reduce employees’ motivation to blow the whistle outside the company to...
After more than a year of legal challenges and public criticism about the inadequacy and fairness of rules governing proceedings held in its administrative court, the SEC finally caved. But it doesn’t want it to appear that way. The recent announcement of its proposal to amend a number of substantive...
Practitioners and parties familiar with the SEC’s administrative proceedings avoid them whenever possible, preferring federal court. Recently such respondents have drawn hope from a spate of district court rulings suggesting that they may invoke constitutional grounds to have their administrative proceedings enjoined or re-routed to federal court....