In 2012, I was stunned to hear an official of Deloitte place
all his faith in the internal firewalls that he had constructed in the CPA firm
to inhibit the exploitation of the conflict of interest that exists between the
auditing and consulting divisions. A year later, Matt Winkler of Bloomberg
apologized because reporters in the news division had used clients’ proprietary
information from the Bloomberg terminals to report financial news stories before
other news organizations. The firewall between selling terminals and reporting
news had not been sufficient to prevent exploitation of the conflict of interest.
There is a lesson here for any multi-divisional company or bank that is relying
on firewalls.
The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
