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Imagine getting slapped with a $100,000 past-due tax bill from the state of California several years after you purchased an aircraft, and you don't even live in that state. Think it can't happen? Better think again, as this type of scenario plays out with increasing frequency as California grapples with perennial budget shortages.

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According to AMR Research, which recently surveyed 60 Fortune 1,000 companies, it is estimated that the Fortune 1,000 will spend $2.5 billion in 2003 alone in costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. How much more will be spent by smaller public companies and by those in the private-company sector is a mystery, but the total costs - in cash, time, consulting fees, lost opportunities, and human resources - will surely be staggering.

Imagine receiving a call from corporate indicating that your captive team has done a wonderful job of providing financing for your manufacturer parent organization. In fact, as a result of this excellent performance the parent company's leverage ratio is reaching the point that its financial rating may be reduced by the rating agencies. This is the type of good news/bad news call most captive managers would rather not receive.

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The headlines reporting multi-million dollar corporate guilty pleas often miss a point widely understood among white-collar practitioners: The driving force behind the corporate plea is often not the merits of the government's charge, but the corporation's need to reach a global settlement resolving administrative and criminal sanctions that could put the company out of business. Considering the role of prosecutorial discretion and the draconian consequences of a corporate conviction, corporations often have little choice but to plead guilty and cooperate with the government. Recently, the feds have raised the ante in this process by defining "cooperation" to include waiving the attorney-client privilege. Thus, corporations and counsel alike are forced into a Hobson's choice where at least partial waiver may be inevitable.

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Although compliance is generally thought of in a regulatory sense, every corporation that could be involved in litigation needs to consider the implications of how and what information is stored. In a sense, heavily regulated industries such as health care, securities, banking, and commodities are in a better position since the specifics of record keeping are set out in great detail. All industries that interact with the government can assume that their time will come. Other corporations may not discover whether they are adequately preserving information until they are faced with a discovery request. In either event, failure to comply can have dire financial consequences.

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In the wake of the headline-grabbing corporate fraud scandals starting with Enron, the Justice Department earlier this year issued revised guidelines making a corporation's waiver of the attorney-client and work-product protections a factor in determining whether to charge a corporation for criminal conduct, including fraud. Under these guidelines, prosecutors may "consider" a company's willingness to identify wrongdoers, make witnesses available, disclose the results of its internal investigation and waive the attorney-client and work-product protections.

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