Summit Notebook

With end of TARP, investigations into fraud take center stage

While the much maligned $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has officially ended, not everything has wrapped up — auditors are just starting to hit their stride investigating scores of cases of possible malfeasance.

Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the program, nicknamed SIGTARP, said his office has more than 120 criminal investigations underway. They are looking into whether the money loaned to financial institutions and automakers was used properly or not, if there was fraud in applications for TARP financial backing and other wrongdoing.

“Our focus on investigations is growing and that’s an area where we are definitely in a ramp-up phase,” Barofsky told the Reuters Washington Summit. “The crimes that have been committed were committed in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The most common statute of limitation for fraud is five years and there’s a reason for that, it takes a while for these type of sophisticated while collar investigations … to hit, for fraud to be discovered and it takes a while to investigate them.”

Barofsky lamented that finding experienced people willing to come to work for a temporary agency was proving to be a challenge.

“We’re looking for experienced, white collar investigators who want to come over to a temporary agency, that is not the deepest of pools, to be honest with you, if I could find more I would hire more,” he said.

Additionally, Barofsky plans to launch an after-action audit of the U.S. Treasury Department’s role in General Motors’ initial public offering, which would include examining the decision-making process and whether it maximized the return for taxpayers.

“I expect it will be a broad inquiry that goes into this. In many ways, this is a pretty unprecedented activity for a government to be selling its shares to the public in an IPO like this,” he said, adding that he expected other such audits of other companies that the federal government has stakes in and plan to go public.

SEC’s Schapiro says journalist job cuts worrying

Mary Schapiro, America’s new top cop for the securities industry, said the current mass culling of journalists’ jobs is a concern because it could reduce the number of leads that regulators get as they seek to crack down on nefarious behavior.

“It’s an absolute worry for me because I think financial journalists have in many cases been the sources of some really important enforcement cases and really important discovery of practices and products that regulators should be profoundly concerned about,” the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission told the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington on Tuesday.

“But for journalists having been dogged and determined and really pursuing some of these things, they might not be known to the regulators or they might not be known for a long time,” she said.

But Schapiro, who was speaking a day after Conde Nast announced the closure of its glossy business magazine Portfolio only about two years after it launched, held out some hope for the business reporting trade. She said that some journalists should consider applying for jobs at the SEC.

“Investigative journalism actually would be a pretty interesting skill set for us to have. We’ve talked about financial analysis, we’ve talked about forensic accounting being skill sets that we really need — understanding of complex trading, strategies and systems, but it’s one of the things the SEC has to do. It has to really broaden its horizons and bring in people who think about things a little differently than it has historically.”

But what would having Mr/Ms Investigative Journalist working there do for the SEC’s tarnished media image? And how would a hard-nosed investigative journalist respond to all those agreements to let some of the bad guys off with a rap over the knuckles and a small fine (those infamous “did not admit or deny” settlements)?

NFL exec: Most of our players are good guys

The NFL is getting a lot of gruff over the fact that some of its players have been taking the “bad boy” persona a wee bit too far. But the league says that most of its players know that violence belongs on the field; not at home, in bars or, say, crossing state lines.

Eric Grubman, the NFL’s top business executive, declined to comment on the incident involving New York Giants receiver Plaxico Burress — who shot himself this past weekend.

But Grubman told the Reuters Media Summit that most of the league’s other players behave themselves.

Bad behavior hurts all of us. The fans don’t like it, our sponsors don’t like it, and you know what? The players don’t like it. The vast majority of players are hard working. We hear about a few players a week, out of 1,600 players, many of them have been out of college a couple of years. To have so few incidents out of the total is really astonishing.

Of course, his “so few” is “so many” to others, particularly bloggers. One site counts the number of days since an NFL player has been arrested. Today, in light of Burress, it’s set at Zero.

I don’t want to comment on that case, because I don’t know what the facts are and I’m not the commissioner, but our policy in regard to firearms and other things are abundantly clear, and every player’s responsibility to adhere to those policies. Yeah these things are bad, but I would really emphasize that it’s a small minority of players (who get in trouble).

He added that the league avoids any real backlash from sponsors by quickly identifying and taking action against bad behavior.