Reporting to the Board on your Compliance and Ethics Program: New Guidance and Good Practices

Rebecca Walker is a partner in the law firm of Kaplan & Walker LLP, a law firm specializing in corporate compliance and governance located in Santa Monica, California and Princeton, New Jersey. Ms. Walker has advised numerous companies in diverse industries on the design and implementation of the various components of an ethics and compliance program, including risk assessment, compliance training, monitoring and auditing systems, supervisory structure and program documentation. She has also conducted numerous assessments of companies’ compliance and ethics programs. Her clients have included companies from the consumer products, apparel, financial services, pharmaceutical, healthcare, banking, advertising, consulting, telecommunications, energy and retail industries, including many companies in the Fortune 500.

Ms. Walker received her B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Georgetown University and her J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School. She is the author of Conflicts of Interest in Business and the Professions: Law and Compliance, published by Thomson West in 2005. She is the co-author of Finding the Right Balance: The Essentials of Third Party Ethics Programs, a survey of third-party compliance and ethics programs conducted with The Conference Board in 2008. Ms. Walker has published numerous articles regarding corporate compliance and is a contributing editor of ethikos, a leading compliance and ethics journal. Ms. Walker co-chairs the Practising Law Institute's annual Compliance and Ethics Institutes in New York and San Francisco and their annual Advanced Compliance Workshops. She is a frequent speaker on ethics and compliance issues, including for the Practising Law Institute, The Conference Board, the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association and other legal and business groups. Ms. Walker serves on the Advisory Boards of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Corporate Compliance Center at the South Texas College of Law.

Jeffrey M. Kaplan is a partner in Kaplan & Walker LLP, a law firm in Princeton, New Jersey and Santa Monica, California. He has specialized since the early 1990’s in the practice of corporate compliance related law, including assisting companies in developing, implementing and reviewing corporate compliance/ethics programs; conducting risk analyses; writing/editing codes of conduct; conducting training; developing compliance auditing and reporting systems; establishing compliance/ethics offices; and assisting boards of directors in meeting their fiduciary duties under the Caremark case. He has also assessed compliance/ethics programs for several governmental entities and serves as a compliance monitor and has conducted numerous internal investigations for companies and boards of directors. For many years he was pro bono Counsel to the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association. He is also co-editor with Joe Murphy of Compliance Programs and the Corporate Sentencing Guidelines (West. 1993); co-author of The Prevention and Prosecution of Computer and High Technology Crime (Matthew Bender 1989); co-author with Ronald Berenbeim of Ethics Programs - The Role of the Board; A Global Study and of another study on how prosecutors use compliance/ethics program criteria in corporate criminal charging decisions, both published by The Conference Board; as well as author of numerous articles and book chapters on compliance/ethics program matters. He is Adjunct Professor of Business Ethics at the Stern School of Business, NYU. In 2009 he was a recipient of a Compliance and Ethics Award from the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics, which that organization bestows annually on “Compliance and Ethics Champions.” He received his J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard University, is a former partner of several other law firms and is a member of the New York and New Jersey bars.