The Wall Street Journal has a report on a report commissioned by Bloomberg L.P. after its journalists were found to be using Bloomberg-terminal customer data to assist their newsgathering:
the company in April restricted its journalists' access to subscriber data, following a complaint from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a big client.
At the time, it also appointed an executive to a newly created position of client data compliance officer. The report by Promontory found that in the wake of those steps, Bloomberg was in line with appropriate standards for data security and regulatory compliance, based on comparisons to industry standards in place for other financial institutions and data providers. Nevertheless it recommended the creation of a more senior chief risk and compliance officer who would report to the CEO and oversee departments such as client data security, corporate compliance and security.
As I've written about earlier (please see, for example here, here, here, here, and here), the culture of "compliance" is one of the signal features of the Obama era. Even by that standard, though, a recommendation (by the Promontory Group, whose leadership includes many former government officials) that a firm hire a compliance officer whose job it would be to oversee the other compliance officer really is emblematic. As Richard Epstein sagaciously predicted back in 2010, we will see a systematic shift from production to compliance as the kind of general political ethic of our time.