Can you hear it?
The news media is tracking the issue of what companies are doing to balance the orderly administration of compliance programs with federal laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
And the take is somewhat anti-business; consider this treatment of arbitration provisions:
Another tactic firms are using is to require employees to sign contracts that compel any who exhaust the Labor Department’s process to submit allegations of Sarbanes-Oxley violations to binding arbitration rather than filing suit in federal court.
A year after the law was passed, Salomon Smith Barney, the brokerage arm of Citigroup, won its bid to force into arbitration a former research analyst who claimed he was fired for refusing to alter a research report. The allegation clearly is covered by Sarbanes-Oxley, the court held, but that doesn’t override the contract the worker signed agreeing to arbitration.
There’s a fine line between encouraging employees to bring forward concerns and having some reasonable chance to hear about it and correct any issues before the Feds come knocking on the door.
