At the headline level, the role of the Australian Taxation Office is to administer tax, excise and superannuation laws that fund public services for Australians and give effect to social and economic policy.But what does that say about our role in practical terms? How do we go about achieving...

Effective enforcement is vital to the successful implementation of social legislation, and legislation that is not enforced, rarely fulfils its social objectives. This paper examines the question of how the enforcement task might best be conducted to achieve policy outcomes that are effective...

What role do corporate boards play in compliance? Compliance programs are internal enforcement programs, whereby firms train, monitor and discipline employees with respect to applicable laws and regulations. Corporate enforcement and compliance failures could not be more high-profile, and have...

Compliance is a growing field of practice across multiple areas of law. Increasingly companies put compliance risk among the most important corporate governance issues facing them. Moreover, as “JD plus” jobs proliferate, the demand for hiring both at the entry level and for former students...

Recent years have seen a rediscovery of the fact that a healthy financial and economic system cannot be based on the lowest common behavioural denominator of what is technically permissible under the black letter of the law. Something more is needed – variously described as ‘sound culture',...

The authors present an analytical framework for bank complexity through the hypothesis that complexity is necessary for banks to stay viable in the evolving industry of financial intermediation. They look at organizational structures of bank holding companies gauged by the number and types of...

Fines imposed on firms for corporate infringements such as cartels reduce these infringement's profitability. When a manager knows when a violation is unprofitable he can prevent violations committed by an uninformed employee by investing in compliance programs (CPs). Investments can be...

Corporations, like the rest of us, must comply with environmental and other laws or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, these consequences can pale in comparison to the gains to be made from non-compliance. Law-and-economics scholarship recognizes this and, by treating many laws as mere...

In today's regulatory environment, a corporation engaged in wrongdoing can be sure of one thing: regulators will point to an ineffective compliance program as a key cause of institutional misconduct. The explosion in the importance of compliance is unsurprising given the emphasis that...

In 2019, the CEO and chairperson of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, called for corporate leaders to embrace corporate purpose and create value for stakeholders, and 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable committed to lead their companies for the benefit of all...