Now Gerry Corrigan will be doing some troubleshooting for Goldman Sachs, where he’s spent the past nine years co-chairing the firm’s global risk management and compliance control committees. The no-nonsense Corrigan is Goldman’s answer to the rising tide of skepticism about the quality and integrity of Wall Street research - a tide that reached a new high last month when Merrill Lynch, under pressure from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, agreed to pay a fine of $100 million and to revamp its operations. As “ombudsman” to Goldman’s analysts, Corrigan vows that he “will play a major role in helping to help shelter the analyst community here at Goldman Sachs from any effort on the part of anybody - internal or external - to influence, however subtly, the objectivity and integrity of their professional opinions.” Corrigan is hosting a series of town meetings with Goldman researchers worldwide, with the goal of meeting them and gaining their trust. “These people have to have a very high degree of confidence in me and know me as an individual, and, frankly, most of them do not at this point,” he says. “This will give people some comfort and confidence that they can approach me when they feel they are facing a problem.” How would Corrigan handle, say, investment bankers pressuring an analyst to praise a client? “The first thing I would do is spend as much time as necessary talking to the analyst to make sure there’s no misunderstanding of fact or circumstance. And as soon as I was certain of that, I can guarantee you that I would immediately go to the other person or persons and say, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’”
