Bill Cohan, Columnist

Don't Let Brokers Keep Watch on Themselves

In the cruel irony department comes the saga of Jill Wile, a former manager in the southeast regional office of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the self-policing group for brokerages.

March 13, 2014 at 1:24 PM UTC

By Bill Cohan

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Letting brokerages police themselves is akin to letting the fox guard the henhouse. Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg News

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In the cruel irony department comes the saga of Jill Wile, a former manager in the southeast regional office of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the self-policing group for brokerages.

She was fired in March 2013 after 25 years, stellar performance reviews and repeated clashes with a new boss who seemed determined to get rid of her. After getting the approval of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Wile recently filed a federal disability, age and sex discrimination lawsuit against Finra seeking unspecified damages.