Alison Frankel

Last April, as a follow-up to revelations that Wal-Mart had allegedly covered up bribes paid by its Mexican subsidiary, the great Corporate Counsel reporter Sue Reisinger ran a very surprising piece. Despite the scandal engulfing Wal-Mart, defense lawyers told Reisinger that the company may have made a strategically smart decision not to disclose the matter to the government. Smart? Really? Would Wal-Mart’s alleged bribery have blown up into a public relations fiasco that cried out for governmental consequences if the company had quietly admitted the facts to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Justice Department?

I figured Dodd-Frank’s whistle-blower provisions would make corporate self-reporting even more of a no-brainer, since insiders now have not only a moral and legal incentive but also a powerful financial motive to alert the SEC when they suspect wrongdoing. According to BuckleySandler partner Thomas Sporkin, who until last June was chief of the SEC’s Office of Market Intelligence, the commission receives 1.2 whistle-blower tips a day, on average. If I were a corporate official wondering whether to self-report, I’d assume that one of those tips was about my company and run to the feds before they came to me.

But according to several of the most prominent SEC enforcement advisers in Washington, w ho were speaking Thursday at Securities Docket’s Securities Enforcement Forum, corporations should think hard about the decision to confess their sins or handle problems internally. “You have to decide whether the issue merits the government’s involvement,” said William McLucas of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in a follow-up phone conversation Friday. Even in an era in which “you have to assume there are no secrets,” McLucas said, problems that fall short of systemic wrongdoing call for judgment, not reflexive confession. “That’s why you have compliance systems and controls,” he said.

William Baker of Latham & Watkins told me Friday that under Dodd-Frank, companies have to be wary that whistle-blowers will go to the SEC, but, like McLucas, said there is a range of problems that can be handled effectively enough in-house that even if the SEC launches an investigation, the agency will be satisfied with the company’s response. If, on the other hand, the wrongdoing involves anything that would affect public disclosures, Baker said, it must be reported. “It’s a very difficult, very nuanced decision for a company,” he said.

It’s also difficult for outside counsel, McLucas said at Thursday’s conference. If outside lawyers recommend that clients throw themselves on the mercy of the government and the government doesn’t show mercy, that’s not a good outcome for the lawyers. Clients, Baker added, also have to think about the higher cost of dealing with a government investigation rather than handling a problem internally. In a panel on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, former SEC FCPA enforcement chief Cheryl Scarboro of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett said that while government policy is to reward self-reporting, it’s not always clear what the benefits are. And if companies do report that they’ve made illegal payments to officials in one country, added Joseph Warin of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, they often find their practices in other countries under investigation.

I have a bold assertion: Breach of contract suits by mortgage-backed securities trustees are no longer a rarity. In my daily feed of new filings, I’m seeing a fairly regular trickle of cases asserting trustee claims that mortgage originators didn’t live up to their representations and warranties about the loans they sold to MBS trusts. The roster of firms filing cases for trustees has expanded as well. Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman still seems to be the likeliest to appear on the signature page of MBS trustee complaints, but last week MoloLamken filed a put-back suit in New York State Supreme Court for the trustee of a Morgan Stanley MBS trust, and Holwell Shuster & Goldberg brought a put-back claim in the same court for the trustee of a Deutsche Bank-backed trust.

So, now that put-back filings have become as relatively commonplace as Miguel Cabrera home runs, it’s time to start asking how successful the cases will be. Banks have been disposing of billions of dollars of put-back demands asserted by bond insurers and by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years, but those claims haven’t been resolved through litigation. And Bank of America reached its proposed $8.5 billion global settlement with private investors in Countrywide mortgage-backed securities before the investors’ lawyers at Gibbs & Bruns filed a complaint claiming that Countrywide breached MBS representations and warranties. As far as I’m aware, there has been no publicly disclosed settlement of a put-back case filed by an MBS trustee acting at the behest of private certificate holders.

With that paucity of precedent, a ruling this week in one of the earliest put-back cases on the dockets is bad news for certificate holders. The suit, filed by Kasowitz Benson against the originators of loans in a $555 million Wells Fargo MBS offering, stemmed from an investigation that noteholders demanded back in April 2010. In a sample of 200 of the 3,000 loans in the underlying pool, investors identified material breaches in 150, or 75 percent, of the sample. When the originators EquiFirst and WMC Mortgage refused to accede to put-back demands based on breaches in the sample, the MBS trustee, U.S. Bank, sued on behalf of noteholders.

For good or ill, one of my themes over the last 18 months has been frustration with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement efforts. And according to a recently published study by Berkeley Law professor Stavros Gadinis, I’m not alone. Gadinis’s paper, posted Wednesday at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, said that it’s been three decades since any academic analysis of SEC enforcement actions against broker-dealers. In that time, Gadinis wrote, the information vacuum has been filled with complaints about the commission’s perceived foot-dragging and questions about the so-called revolving door between the SEC and private law firms. To add some substance to the discussion, Gadinis undertook what he said was the first systematic examination of SEC enforcement actions against broker-dealers — a category that includes major financial institutions — in 30 years, analyzing more than 400 cases finalized in 1998 and 2005-2007. (Gadinis added 1998 to the study so it would include cases brought in a Democratic administration.) His overall conclusion: Size matters, at least when you’re a broker-dealer facing off against the SEC. According to the prof’s data, firms with more than 1,000 employees fared much better than their smaller counterparts in terms of whether cases are brought against individual defendants; whether the SEC brought cases as administrative proceedings; and what kind of sanctions the SEC extracted.

“Big firms get different treatment,” Gadinis said in a phone interview Thursday. “That could be for many reasons (but) it’s not a nice result for the SEC, which is supposed to be a unbiased regulator of markets. Whatever the motivation, the results are not good.”

Gadinis said it’s too soon to opine on the SEC’s actions since the first four months of 2007, which is when his study ended. He also said that ideally, his data would have included SEC investigations that did not result in enforcement actions, but, as I’ve noted, those aren’t captured in publicly available materials. But with those caveats, Gadinis said his study indicates that, historically, the SEC “is reluctant to bring cases against individuals connected with big firms.”