Journal · Essay
Writing for two audiences: the regulator and the record
Every statement made during an investigation is read twice: once by the public on the day and once by the investigator months later. Only the second reading has consequences.
When a company is under investigation, everything it says in public is read twice. The first reading happens on the day, by journalists, customers, employees and investors, who want to know what is going on. The second happens months or years later, by the investigator, who wants to know whether what the company said on the day was true.
Most companies write for the first reading. They should write for the second.
The second reader is patient and thorough. She has the documents. She knows what the company knew on the day it made its statement, because she has its emails. She will compare every sentence of the statement with what she knows, and where they differ she will ask why, and the answer will go in her report.
The second reading
- Is every factual statement supported by something the company knew at the time?
- Does any word claim more than the facts allow? “Isolated”, “thorough”, “immediately” and “fully” are the usual suspects.
- Does the statement say who did not know something? If so, is that exactly true, of exactly those people?
- Would the statement still read well if the investigator quoted it in full beside the documents?
The third question deserves particular care. Statements during investigations often say that something happened “without the knowledge of senior management”. That is a precise claim about the knowledge of a defined group of people, and it will be tested against the emails of every one of them. If it is true, it is a powerful sentence. If it is true only of some of them, it is a sentence that will be read aloud.
Writing for the second reader is slower and the result is less satisfying on the day. It is also the only kind of statement that does not get worse with time.