As Enron and Arthur Andersen fight for survival after related, but independent, wrongdoing by high-level employees, questions abound regarding the extent to which the corporate culture in each instance encouraged or condoned employee wrongdoing and, ultimately, what went wrong with each company’s legal compliance programs.
Compliance is at the heart of the federal organizational sentencing guidelines, which are widely credited with a major increase in corporate legal compliance and ethics programs. Ten years after the organizational sentencing guidelines went into effect, the United States Sentencing Commission has convened an ad hoc advisory group designed to review their effectiveness. Such a review seems particularly opportune in light of the Enron debacle and its graphic illustration of the ills the organizational guidelines were intended to prevent and punish.
