from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

Stating the obvious: if you do this in traditional finance you will be fired with very high probability and there is a nontrivial risk of civil or criminal litigation to top it off. This is not because we're fuddy duddies who think that financial executives make too much money. t.co/XGNZyVcpNf

It is because if you allow explicit corruption of people who have a concrete or notional duty to safeguard the interests of many other people, they will tend to optimize for that incentive and not for doing a good job, managing risks, angling for 5% extra bonus, etc.

The threshold for me needing to raise something to the Conflicts Committee was, hmm, $50 or $100? Low enough that it sometimes made planning routine business dinners in Tokyo challenging. Investment in a contra? Yeah that's just *obviously not done.*

There exists a SaaS company that has the characteristics a) I rather like them b) I use them in personal capacity c) a previous employer of mine recommended them to customers at my suggestion d) they routinely attempted to give me gift cards for "referrals" from public writing.

After attempting to fruitlessly get the semi-automated marketing/CS processes over there to stop crediting me with referrals and sending gift cards I escalated to the CEO multiple times because I liked job job and also liked not being in prison and that $#&#ing $150 gift card...

... was presenting unacceptable levels of risk to both. "I mean was it really?" Part of the Compliance dance is that you must act like a vampire showed the true cross when presented with a situation which pattern matches to a bribe so that everyone understands what you'd do.