A key determine within the Justice Department’s marketing campaign to crack down on white-collar crime is trying to make use of a instrument he dropped at bear each as a prosecutor preventing gang violence in New Orleans and as a lawyer for the town’s sole Fortune 500 firm.
Stopping crime earlier than it occurs must be a central aim of the greater than 1,150 workers of the division’s felony division, stated Assistant Attorney General
Kenneth Polite,
who took cost of it final yr. For Mr. Polite, prevention is essential to the division’s efforts to combat each violent crime in addition to company misconduct resembling bribes paid by corporations abroad, he stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“Even if we tried to prosecute every instance of corporate wrongdoing that we can possibly achieve, it still wouldn’t be enough,” he stated. “We have to invest in prevention as a department, and, frankly, as a society.”
Federal prosecutors coping with gangs and gun violence have experimented with neighborhood outreach, youth mentorship packages and different methods to stop crime earlier than it occurs. They at the moment are seeking to do one thing related within the cubicles and boardrooms of American firms by way of a deal with compliance.
Over the final twenty years, compliance has turn into a standard specialization in company authorized departments, thanks partly to the Justice Department’s aggressive marshaling of far-reaching statutes just like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an antibribery legislation Mr. Polite’s division enforces together with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In an indication of the instances, Mr. Polite [pronounced po-LEET] is the primary in his position to have labored as a chief compliance officer at a significant firm. Between stints in public service, Mr. Polite spent a yr at
Entergy Corp.
, the place his job was to make sure the utility’s 12,500 workers didn’t fall afoul of state and federal guidelines on honest commerce and authorities contracting.
In current years, the Justice Department has launched and reworked quite a few insurance policies on the way it prosecutes corporations, partly to encourage those who aren’t strictly required to have a compliance program to put money into one anyway. Mr. Polite has stated he sees room to develop that work. Outside the division, his background has added a brand new diploma of credibility to the Justice Department’s efforts to strike to the fitting tone on company accountability.
“A lot of people who talk that talk are just mouthing platitudes. In Kenneth’s case, he takes the compliance stuff very, very seriously, because he’s sat in that chair and understands the relationship between tone-at-the-top and corporate culture.”
“A lot of people who talk that talk are just mouthing platitudes,” stated
David Zornow,
a long-time company protection lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, who mentored Mr. Polite as an affiliate there.
“In Kenneth’s case, he takes the compliance stuff very, very seriously, because he’s sat in that chair and understands the relationship between tone-at-the-top and corporate culture,” Mr. Zornow stated.
Mr. Polite was raised by a single mom in public housing in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. His father was a 37-year veteran of the town’s police drive. Top of his highschool class, he went on to attend Harvard University and Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.
In 2004, his half-brother was fatally shot on the streets of New Orleans. That tragedy was the singular occasion that impressed him to turn into a prosecutor, he has stated, becoming a member of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan in 2007.
Several years later, he left New York along with his household to return to New Orleans, the place he was nominated by President
Barack Obama
in 2013 to take over the U.S. legal professional’s workplace there within the aftermath of a scandal involving on-line posts by two of the workplace’s senior members.
His tenure got here within the midst of rising nationwide protests over the killing by police of Black males resembling Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. As a U.S. legal professional, Mr. Polite each elevated the variety of prosecutors dealing with circumstances of violent crime and launched initiatives geared toward proactively lowering gun violence and serving to previously incarcerated individuals re-enter society.
Critics of the Justice Department’s method to white-collar crime argue that firms and their executives are accorded issues not usually given to street-level offenders. Companies typically resolve misconduct by paying fines, and prosecutors don’t at all times convey circumstances in opposition to the executives accountable for their employer’s violations.
Now on the helm of the felony division, Mr. Polite says the Justice Department’s insurance policies on white-collar crime must be “seamlessly analogous” with the remainder of its wide-ranging temporary. “All of my experiences as a prosecutor, and outside of DOJ, inform the way that I think about all of these types of cases,” he stated.
To illustrate the significance of prevention, Mr. Polite pointed to his work prosecuting gangs in New Orleans. “Within months, unless we invest in that community, or we invest in the young people to make sure that they are not engaging in that criminality…very quickly, we see replication of that entire [gang] organization back in that neighborhood.”
Under Attorney General
Merrick Garland,
the Justice Department has stated it could surge assets to combat white-collar crime and overview the way in which it handles circumstances involving corporations with lengthy rap sheets. Some of the proposed modifications have met with skepticism from protection legal professionals and compliance officers.
One such coverage introduced by Mr. Polite requires chief compliance officers to personally certify their firm’s program is “reasonably designed” to stop future violations on the finish of a settlement settlement with prosecutors. Lawyers have stated the coverage, which in idea carries the specter of felony prosecution, is well-intentioned, however misguided.
But Mr. Polite has defended the certifications, saying the purpose isn’t to prosecute compliance officers, however to empower them. The coverage is designed to provide them “the ability to go anywhere within that enterprise and ask the questions that they need to ask and demand answers to ensure that they feel confident to put their name on [the certification],” he stated.
To bolster the division’s credibility on compliance issues, he has recruited others with related experience. Last month, he introduced the hiring of
Glenn Leon,
head of compliance for
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.
, to steer the felony division’s fraud part. The division will improve the eye it locations on discovering and aiding victims of white-collar crime, Mr. Polite has stated.
“We are trying to emphasize to our corporate community how important it is to us that they invest in these, to be preventative,” he stated. “Like any other area of criminality, we can’t prosecute our way to a fully compliant corporate culture.”
Write to Dylan Tokar at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Source: www.wsj.com”