We investigate from within, for companies and for their boards and audit and compliance committees, and then build the program that keeps the next one from happening.
The most damaging version of a government investigation is the one a company learns about from the government. We investigate from within, for companies and for their boards and audit and compliance committees, in matters involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the False Claims Act, the Anti-Kickback Statute and Stark Law, securities laws, and environmental laws, and often alongside a live government investigation.
Working with investigators and forensic accountants, we move to preserve evidence, interview the people who know, and produce a report management can act on. Where the answer warrants it, we prepare voluntary disclosures and deal with the regulator directly. Then we build the compliance program that keeps the next one from happening.
An internal investigation can be run for the company, for a board, for an audit or compliance committee, or for a special committee formed for the purpose. Those are different clients with different interests, and the choice determines who holds the privilege, who receives the report, and whether the work will be credible to a regulator later.
We settle that at the outset and in writing, before the first interview. Where management is potentially implicated, an investigation reporting to management is worth very little to anyone, including management.
Finding the problem is the straightforward part. What follows is a judgment call with real consequences either way: whether to disclose voluntarily, what to disclose, to whom, and when. Self-disclosure can substantially change how an agency treats a company. It can also hand a regulator a case it did not have.
We have taken clients through voluntary disclosure, including under the Department of Health and Human Services Self-Disclosure Protocol, and we have advised against it where the facts did not support it. The recommendation should come from someone who has argued both sides of it in front of the agency.
A report that sits in a drawer changes nothing. The last phase of the work is the part a regulator will ask about: what the company did after it found out. We draft the policies, train the people who have to follow them, and build the controls that make the next version of this problem visible early, in areas including the Anti-Kickback Statute and Stark Law, the False Claims Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
