Governments are testing an age-old idiom: You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The Southern District of New York, one of the country’s most prominent federal white-collar crime courts, is encouraging companies to come clean about their potential financial misconduct. In exchange, companies that qualify could avoid criminal charges.

On February 24, US Attorney Jay Clayton announced the SDNY’s new Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Program for Financial Crimes. The program offers a “fast track” for companies that report their own fraud and financial misconduct before prosecutors come knocking or a whistleblower outs them.

Companies that self-report fraud or market manipulation, cooperate with investigators, make amends for the wrongdoings, and commit to three years of conduct reporting can receive a conditional declination letter from the government, which says the company won’t be brought up on criminal charges.

Keep reading.—JK

With 2026 set to be an important year for IPOs, including the potential debuts of AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, we wanted a veteran’s take on the experience of steering a company through going public.

Bill Zerella has shepherded three companies through new public listings. He’s currently the CFO of ACV Auctions, a vehicle auction platform he helped take public in 2021. Fitbit and healthcare communication platform Vocera were the first two.

CFO Brew talked with Zerella to get his vantage point on the challenges of preparing for an IPO and the current conditions for companies getting ready to hit the markets.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With your experience of taking companies public, what are you seeing in the IPO market now?

The bar keeps getting raised in terms of bringing companies to the public markets…There were some very successful IPOs last year. A lot of the bankers that I talked to expect this year to be a pretty good year for IPOs. There are a lot of companies that have grown to be pretty large as private companies, because the private equity markets are incredibly deep today versus 20 years ago. So companies have a lot of options other than just going public these days, in terms of getting liquidity and raising capital. So I think we’ll start to see things improve this year for IPOs versus the last few years.

Keep reading.—JK

We’ve all heard about how the ongoing war in Iran is hurting the US economy. With oil prices rising to nearly $120 per barrel over the weekend, economists are calling this the biggest oil disruption in history, with many hinting at chances of stagflation.

US stocks slid over the past week, too. Airlines and cruise operators tumbled thanks to soaring fuel prices, while some tech firms faced disruptions tied to data centers in the Middle East.

This all sounds pretty grim, but Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat, has a different perspective: He argues that the rise in oil prices actually serves to benefit the US economy. That sounds pretty counterintuitive at first, but his reasoning comes down to a few key points.

Keep reading on Brew Markets.—SY

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Senior Director, Revenue Operations at Cognosos
• Risk/Margin Analyst at Fintex Financial Inc
• Emerging Markets Equity, Investment Analyst - MSIM - Associate at Morgan Stanley
• CFO at Cammack Children's Center
• Senior Tax Accountant at ADKF PC