Couldn't have said it better myself!

Surely that is pure Reggie Perrin?

No, no---it's Sir Humphrey in his finest hour. Nonsense squared.

I wonder if these people realize they sound like a Marx Brothers routine?

I said it to my wife and couldn't keep a straight face, so I've no idea how they speaker did it.

not Sir Humphrey
It sounds more like his side kick bernhard

"A compliance officer" - is that longhand for "prick"?

An interesting example of how private companies are becomming more like government (lots of companies - not just banks, which have always had a very close relationship with government).

This is partly because of all the regulations (so companies become statist trying to meet statist requirements) and partly because no one owns a lot of these companies.

Not just no single person - even all the individual shareholders together often only own a small fraction of the stock.

"Institutional investors" are really hired managers supposedly in charge of other hired managers (and all sitting on various boards deciding each other's pay and benefits).

"Why is this so?".

Various regulations and tax laws favour institutional investors.

Sadly when government tries to "do something" about this it tends to make things worse - for example by increasing taxes (such as capital gains tax) on the investments of pension funds, rather than reducing (or getting rid of) taxes on the investments (the share holdings) of individuals.

Of course, the inheritance tax is one of the great supports for the corporate system - which is the real reason that such men as Warren Buffet support it (otherwise family firms would not be sold out to his organization for tax reasons).

Sadly modern billionares are often people who know how to play the modern game (which is logical but irritating).

So when there are individuals (rather than just hired managers) they are often (although, thankfully, not always) like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, George Soros, Peter Lewis, Marc Cuban (and so on and so on).

It is like dealing with a bunch of baddies escaped from James Bond stories - even down the the vast charitable projects (that James Bond baddies always seem to be engaged in).

So this is for real?

Yes, in the sense that all the policies had been rewritten, this was why, and this had to be explained to us. In defence of the person who uttered the sentence, he did smile as he said it.

In rollcall a few years ago, our then shift supervisor read off something about how any submissions for our policy and procedures manual needed to follow a certain format.

Actually, his statement sounded a lot like the quote on the front page.

I think that's why he stopped in mid-sentence and asked "Jesus Christ, who writes this s**t?"