Beth Golden is refreshingly candid about the challenges of her new job. She, too, was formerly a deputy of Mr Spitzer and her legal background includes work on the Whitewater case. “It’s a steep learning curve for me,” she says.

But her lack of direct Wall Street experience was part of the reason why she was selected to head and build up Bear Stearns’ compliance department.

“One of the current criticisms of this industry is that whenever it is accused of wrongdoing, the defence is ‘we’ve been doing it like that for years’ or ‘our competitors all do it this way’,” she says. “A competitor’s behaviour may be identical but it does not make the conduct necessarily appropriate. It’s good to have someone who is not so deeply embedded in the business practices looking at those practices with fresh eyes.”

She boasts of strong backing from her firm. “The support I have received so far from both the firm’s leadership and its employees has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic,” she says.

But it seems as if a decade’s worth of questions are now being asked all at once. “Many of the questions regulators are asking are very good questions,” she says. “But it can be difficult resource-wise to address and resolve every issue all at the same time.”

This has been true for brokers both large and small, and the result has been a steep rise in outsourcing to private law firms, as in-house legal departments have trouble dealing with the mass of enquiries.

Still, there are positive aspects. “The amount of regulatory activity is good for the investing public. And, to the extent that the rules become clearer, that will be good for the industry as well,” says Ms Golden.

And in what may be the crux for compliance officers across Wall Street, their advice seems to matter more. “We’re all more introspective now, and that’s an achievement,” says Ms Golden. “People are examining their business practices perhaps in a way that they never did before. And, instead of immediately going off to do something, they often now pick up the phone and call someone in the legal and compliance department and say: ‘I’m thinking of doing this. What do you think? Am I missing something?’”

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