I'll start and I'll let my legal counsel correct me.
The right for parties to have a recourse mechanism is extremely important. As the chief compliance and enforcement officer, I issue a notice of violation that determines the amount of the AMP that we deem is appropriate, given the circumstances. If there have been 100 violations or 100,000 violations, how participative the company has been...back to my “help negotiate with us.” In the particular Blackstone situation, we issued an AMP for a significant amount of money. The company at that time had not been very co-operative with our investigation. We issued a notice of violation for a significant amount of money.
Those in violation have 30 days to respond to the commission and say they would like to make a representation before the commission. They chose to activate that, and they said, “Okay, we have a whole bunch of additional information now and we're willing to provide some additional information to plead our case.” I think that recourse mechanism is important.
I think the Blackstone case is important in that it shows that the system works. I conduct my investigation, my team conducts their investigation with the information they have available to them, and I issue a judgment, if you will. If the party is not agreeable to that, they can choose to go to the commission and say, “Wait a minute, I don't think they included this information, I don't think they took this into consideration. Oh, we didn't have financial statements at the time but we have them now.” Whatever information they have, they can plead their case to the commission.
We've had cases where the commission has upheld the notice of violation and the amount that the CCO has issued, and there are cases like Blackstone, where they've reduced it. But it shows that the system works.