FINRA issued the fifth in a six-part series of podcasts about its Regulatory and Examination Priorities for 2015. The podcast addressed the following financial and operational priorities: (i) funding and liquidity; (ii) sales of tax-exempt products; (iii) cybersecurity; and (iv) outsourcing. FINRA stated that it will examine these areas by: examining for integrity of mark-to-market in corporate, asset-backed and municipal-debt securities and looking at the supervisory controls surrounding the overall valuation process of funding and liquidity risk-management programs; examining for compliance

The SEC announced that a former executive at a worldwide software manufacturer agreed to settle charges that he violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA") by bribing Panamanian government officials through an intermediary for the purpose of procuring software license sales. An SEC investigation found that a former vice president of global and strategic accounts for the software company orchestrated a scheme to pay $145,000 in bribes to one government official and promised to pay two others in order to obtain four contracts to sell the company's software to the Panamanian government

The SEC's request for an extension of the approved collection of information provided for in Rule 17Ad-15 under the Securities Exchange Act was published in the Federal Register. Rule 17Ad-15 requires approximately 429 transfer agents to establish written standards for the acceptance or rejection of guarantees of securities transfers from eligible guarantor institutions. Transfer agents are required to establish procedures to ensure that those standards are used by the transfer agent to determine whether to accept or reject guarantees from eligible guarantor institutions. Rule 17Ad-16 requires

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) raised concerns about a newly developed communications tool for financial institutions that may impact compliance and enforcement. In a letter sent to financial regulators, including the FDIC, the CFTC, the SEC, the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and FINRA, Senator Warren requested a briefing about a communications system created and described by Symphony Communications LLC, as a way to "prevent government spying," with "no backdoors" with a "guarantee that data deletion is permanent". She asked the federal regulators for

SIFMA Managing Director Dave Oxner "debunked" the "five popular myths" utilized by a "small, but vocal, group of lawmakers and privacy interests" to oppose the Cyber Security Information Sharing Act ("CISA") of 2015. Mr. Oxner set forth the following as fact: (i) "CISA's definition of cyber threat indicators ("CTIs") is very limited" for sharing cyber threat information and rarely results in "any implication of an individual's behavioral, financial, or social information"; (ii) CISA does not authorize the government to surveil individuals, and monitoring can only be conducted on a company's