Throughout the week over at Securities Docket, I highlight the most interesting columns and blog posts from around the web (on the subjects, predictably, of SEC enforcement and securities litigation). Here is a digest of my picks for the week ending December 18:

Siemens ... The Year After (FCPA Professor)FCPA Professor | December 18, 2009Yet, on the same day Siemens agreed to resolve the FCPA matter, the company also announced that a U.S. government agency issued a formal determination declaring Siemens a "responsible contractor." In the year since resolution of the Siemens FCPA matter, the U.S. government continues to do substantial business with the company it recently charged with engaging in a pattern of bribery "unprecedented in scale and geographic scope."

McKool Smith: Financial Crisis Prosecutions Are Just Beginning (Lawrence Delevingne, Law Review)Law ReviewLaw firms like McKool Smith are responding to the expected "explosive growth" by opening or expanding their white collar practices. We spoke with Principals Jack Cooney and Tom Engelboth -- both former New York federal prosecutors -- about trends in white collar crime and the business they expect it to bring the firm. Their message for the financial community? Brace yourself.

An FCPA Pupu Platter (WrageBlog)WrageBlog | December 18, 2009As an active year in FCPA enforcement comes to a close and Anne Richardson of TRACE prepares to head to her hometown in Hawaii for the holidays, she thought it would be worthwhile to present a sampling- a pupu platter, if you will - of interesting and peculiar cases in the evolution of the FCPA.

Preet the Terrible (Reid Pillifant, The New York Observer)NY Observer | December 17, 2009"What U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara did with the Galleon was as if a neutron bomb exploded on Wall Street that was going to destroy criminality," Mr. Batra said recently. In the first 100 days after he was sworn in on August 13, Mr. Bharara engineered such explosions with grim regularity, arresting a series of well-connected New York money people and sending countless other running for cover, wondering if they're next.

Will the SEC Get Personal? (Sarah Johnson, CFO.com)CFO.com | December 15, 2009The public whipping in the BofA case could prompt the SEC to target the people behind a public company's misdeeds "with renewed vigor," theorizes a new report from NERA Economic Consulting. "The SEC is taking very seriously the role of individuals [in allegations of wrongdoing] and is actively enforcing against individuals because ultimately the conduct is done by individuals," says Elaine Buckberg, senior vice president at NERA and a co-author of the report.

Invitation to a Conversation: If the Auditors Were Missing from the Financial Crisis -- Let's Ask Why (Jim Peterson, Re:Balance)Re:Balance | December 14, 2009The auditors "weren't there" as a stopgap in the financial crisis. Why? The simple if depressing reason is that their core product has long since been judged irrelevant. The standard auditor's report is an anachronism -- having lost any value it may once have had, except for legally-required compliance (here). If that single page disappeared from corporate annual reports, no honest user of financial information would admit to missing it. Nor, offered the choice, would any rational CFO pay the fees to obtain it.

THE SEC MUST FOCUS ON THE MERITS NOT PENALTIES (SEC ACTIONS)SEC Actions | December 14, 2009A critical assumption to all of the SEC's flurry of proceedings is that SEC enforcement actions are firmly grounded in the merits. Commission cases are, after all, law enforcement actions designed to enforce the law. In all the discussion about the health of SEC enforcement however, this assumption is never discussed. Perhaps now it is time.

The Skilling Merits Brief (Tom Kirkendall, Houston's Clear Thinkers)Houston's Clear Thinkers | December 12, 2009The Enron Task Force's consistent position in the Skilling prosecution has been that the evidence needed only to show-and did only show-"a material violation of a fiduciary duty that defendants owed to Enron and its shareholders." In other words, making a bad decision or doing a poor job in running a business is a crime. Almost nothing else need be said in explaining why the Skilling appeal is of paramount importance to the protection of taking risk and creating wealth in the American business community.