A volunteer panel of lawyers and other professionals has graded the report by Prudential Life Insurance's special investigation committee on a massive fraud by its sales staff, and most of the marks were low. The third-party committee report grading committee released its assessment on the 5th.
The nine graders each rated the report on a five-point scale from A to D, plus F. D, the second-lowest grade, was the most common with five graders, followed by C from three and B from one. No one gave the lowest grade, F, but the panel called the report "one with no face, where it is not visible who judged what and when," and summed up its verdict as "generally low."
The panel took particular issue with the many points the report left out to protect privacy. It criticized the report for showing no content from hearings with management or people at the parent company, leaving "no material for discussing management responsibility or the board's oversight responsibility."
Hideaki Kubori, the lawyer who chairs the panel, called it "a D close to an F." He said the report barely touches where sales staff went wrong and what they got wrong, or what the management that should have guided and supervised them did. He questioned whether the measures it proposes to prevent a recurrence would work in practice.
Prudential Life set up the special investigation committee of outside lawyers after the fraud came to light, and published its findings in a report in October.