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The Morning Risk Report: Defense Bill Proposes Anti-Money-Laundering Whistleblower Program
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A new whistleblower reward program would offer awards to tipsters who voluntarily provide original information to the Treasury Department or the Justice Department on possible violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. PHOTO: ALASTAIR PIKE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Good morning. A new whistleblower reward program incentivizing the reporting of potential violations of anti-money-laundering laws would be established as part of an annual defense-spending bill that is poised to clear Congress.
The program would offer awards to tipsters who voluntarily provide original information to the Treasury Department or the Justice Department on possible violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Awards would be granted in cases where the tips lead to successful enforcement actions and the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million. Congress is expected to vote as soon as this week on the National Defense Authorization Act for the 2021 fiscal year.
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The program, if enacted, would be an expansion of current incentives, observers said. Existing regulations permit the Treasury, at its discretion, to pay a reward of either $150,000 or 25% of the fine or penalty, whichever is less. Proponents of a new whistleblower program have said the existing incentives aren’t strong enough and haven’t attracted much attention.
The proposed cash-for-tips program would be a critical tool to identify and combat money laundering, Jason Zuckerman, a lawyer at Zuckerman Law who represents whistleblowers, tells Risk & Compliance Journal’s Mengqi Sun. “Often, people aware of money laundering might have learned about it in the course of interaction with organizations that are involved in financial crimes, and stepping forward to report it is a big deal,” Mr. Zuckerman said.
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The U.S. government, along with California, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio, said Dish made millions of unlawful telemarketing calls to consumers. PHOTO: DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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A Dish Network subsidiary will pay $210 million in penalties related to alleged telemarketing violations, in a settlement with the Justice Department and four states.
The U.S. government, along with California, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio, said Dish made millions of unlawful telemarketing calls to consumers and was behind millions more by retailers that marketed Dish products and services. The federal government and the states filed the suit against Dish Network LLC in 2009. The case went to trial in 2016. The Justice Department said the settlement is the largest civil penalty ever paid for telemarketing violations under the Federal Trade Commission Act.
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Target is the latest company to sue major poultry producers, accusing them of price-fixing practices that allegedly led to inflated prices of chicken.
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The retailer, in a lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleges that top chicken suppliers, including Claxton Poultry Farms, Fieldale Farms Corp., Perdue Farms Inc., Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., Sanderson Farms Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc. collectively reduced production to hike prices and coordinated pricing for meat supplies.
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A senior Democratic senator sent a letter to Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai seeking more information on the search giant’s financial relationship with online conglomerate IAC/InterActive, following a Wall Street Journal article that said Google was weighing penalties against IAC for software it created for Google’s Chrome web browser. An internal Google audit found that IAC extensions often don’t provide users the functions they promised and direct them to advertising.
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Lawmakers struggled to resolve a long-running dispute over what kind of liability protections to give businesses and other entities operating during the pandemic, one of two big stumbling blocks remaining in their efforts to strike a deal on an emergency relief package.
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The Sierra Club and other environmental groups are asking a federal judge for access to a swath of internal Interior Department documents as they seek to restore offshore oil-drilling safety rules scaled back by the Trump administration.
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This satellite image provided by the U.S. government shows a Chinese-flagged vessel being loaded with coal at a North Korean port in June.
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China is increasingly flouting international sanctions on North Korea and is no longer trying to hide some of its smuggling activity as it seeks to help Pyongyang endure the Trump administration’s pressure campaign, U.S. officials say.
During the past year, North Korea-flagged vessels have lugged hundreds of coal shipments to China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan area, according to interviews with U.S. officials and U.S. government satellite photos provided to The Wall Street Journal. “It is not particularly disguised or hidden,” said a senior State Department official. “The fact that China is making it easier on them makes it a much more reliable revenue stream than they’ve had.”
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The Trump administration added more than a dozen senior Chinese Communist Party officials to its sanctions blacklist for actions the U.S. says undermined Hong Kong’s autonomy. The measures against 14 vice-chairpersons of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the country’s top legislative body, are part of a series of sanctions against senior Chinese officials who Washington says are responsible for eroding Hong Kong’s political independence.
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President-elect Joe Biden’s national security adviser said the incoming administration wants to put Iran “back into the box” by rejoining the nuclear deal and forcing Tehran to comply with the terms of the original agreement. Re-entering that agreement would mean lifting sanctions worth billions of dollars to Tehran.
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Companies are adding a new tool to their cybersecurity chests: Deception technology, which seeks to trick hackers into thinking they are getting close to critical data. ILLUSTRATION: JON KRAUSE
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An increasing number of companies are looking at an innovative approach to deal with hackers that break into their computer networks. They lure cybercriminals into thinking they’re getting close to the good stuff—and then they trap them. It is a method known as deception technology—and it is gaining momentum as cyberattacks become more sophisticated, and the world moves to less-secure work-from-home models and cloud computing.
This new method doesn’t try to bar intruders from getting in, like firewalls. Instead, deception technology scatters fake information—such as false credentials that can be used to access vital information—throughout a company’s network to lure attackers. Then, when the false information gets hacked, the company is alerted and can either kick out the bad guys or isolate them from the rest of the network to study their methods—and better identify them in the future.
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William Duhnke, chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, at a conference last year. “We hope to make strides in getting our information out sooner for the benefit of all stakeholders,” he commented Monday. PHOTO: DENNY HENRY
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The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is planning to change the way it picks audits for inspection and conducts its evaluation, part of an effort to assess the impact of remote-work constraints on the quality of audits.
The U.S. audit watchdog is increasing “significantly” the percentage of public-company audits it selects randomly for inspection in 2021, PCAOB board member Megan Zietsman said Monday at a virtual conference hosted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
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Nasdaq’s new board-diversity proposal is helping to pave the way for recruiting changes. PHOTO: MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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One of the biggest board recruiting rushes in U.S. corporate history is set to commence, and it is likely to be a delicate one. A new board-diversity proposal from Nasdaq Inc. and a similar mandate passed in California this fall are expected to pave the way for potentially thousands of people with racially and sexually diverse backgrounds to join corporate boards over the next few years.
Recruiting those directors raises a set of challenges for companies. A board candidate’s ethnic background or sexual orientation isn’t always obvious, and scouting those candidates can require some unconventional digging, recruiters and directors say. A bigger, more sensitive issue, many say, is making their boardroom additions more than just a check-the-box exercise.
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MSNBC named Rashida Jones as the network’s president, people familiar with the matter said. Ms. Jones, currently senior vice president for MSNBC News, is succeeding longtime network president Phil Griffin, catapulting her to one of the highest echelons in television news and making her the first Black female executive to run a major cable news network.
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An anti-Covid-19 vaccine march in Stratford, east London, on Saturday. PHOTO: JUSTIN TALLIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Governments are accelerating toward approving the first vaccines to contain Covid-19, but public anxiety over the safety of the doses is threatening to undermine those efforts. One of the biggest factors behind the hesitancy is the very speed at which things have been moving.
The U.K. became the first Western country to start distributing a Covid-19 vaccine to its population, rolling out a mass inoculation program that could provide a template for other countries, including the U.S., of the practicalities and potential pitfalls of vaccinating at speed and scale. Less than a week after Britain granted emergency-use authorization for the shots developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, the first people earmarked for the vaccine began to receive it across the U.K. on Tuesday.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set to release detailed analyses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the first Covid-19 vaccine being considered for U.S. distribution, providing the foundation for a pivotal meeting of a panel that will advise on its possible approval for emergency use.
AstraZeneca and Pfizer, meanwhile, have asked India for emergency-use authorization to start using their Covid-19 vaccines.
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