If you grew up in the late 60s or early 70s, this was THE drum solo. One of first long drum solos in an album. Every drummer knew this song and we all measured ourselves by whether we could play. Echoing the treatment by Ringo Starr in The End it is beautiful in its simplicity. Indeed, it may be the most recognized drum solo in the world, over 50 years after it was released.

The song itself is 17 minutes of acid rock’s best. Indeed XOVLIV.TK said, “Iron Butterfly’s song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is arguably the first heavy metal hit. The original version of the song that appeared on the album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The title track from Iron Butterfly’s album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is its extreme length — the song has a two-and-a-half-minute drum solo.” It was cutting with an edge. For the full effect listen to it with headphones, it will still blow you away. (The phasing the engineers did on that solo was pretty cool too, possibly the first use of electronic effects on drums.)

Iron Butterfly drummer Ron Bushy created a musical solo, that pretty much any drummer could play, it was easily memorized. It is an iconic solo for all the right reasons. Bushy was not trying to prove to people what a chop master he was, but rather to create a section of the song that was a VITAL part of the song, not just drum chops stuck in the middle. The way he ended his solo and came out into that rim click backbeat was the perfect segue to James Ingalls church inspired organ composition. Finally, great drum solos are not simply about technical mastery of the skins. It is more about feeling and emotion. As much as I love the live performances for their over-the-top technical skills, playing the drums is really about emotion. This performance exudes emotion.

Continuing our use of great drum solos to consider the Microsoft Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement action, today we consider what Microsoft did to obtain their result. We have previously considered the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Cease and Desist Order (Order) and the information presented in the Department of Justice’s (DOJs) Non-Prosecution Agreement (NPA). Although Microsoft Hungary accepted responsibility for its actions and admitted the facts stated under the NPA, the DOJ said “the Office will not prosecute Microsoft Hungary for any crimes (except for criminal tax violations, as to which the Fraud Section and Office do not make any agreement) relating to the conduct described in the Statement of Facts”.

The Order reflected that Microsoft’s remediation included enhancing its internal accounting controls and compliance programs, taking disciplinary action against four Microsoft Hungary employees and also terminating four Hungarian licensing partners. On the transaction side of the controls, the company enacted new discount transparency and pass-through requirements, created an expanded transaction monitoring initiative at the regional level, and developed data analytics to help identify high-risk transactions. Microsoft presented this new transaction monitoring system at Converge18 last year and it was quite impressive.

The NPA added more color to Microsoft’s efforts. It noted that the company amped up its internal reporting mechanisms by conducting an organization wide initiative to elicit reports of potential corruption issues. There were enhanced training requirements, both on policies and procedures and the compliance failures reported in the public documents. One control remediation I found quite interesting was the control to “prevent third-party intermediaries from placing licensing orders with Microsoft Hungary before receiving end customer purchase orders.” Finally, transaction monitoring was greatly enhanced, as noted in the Order, at the regional level and in “developing and using data analytics to help identify high-risk transactions.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith further clarified some of the remediation efforts of the company when he stated the following in a publicly released email: “We’ve focused on a process of continuous improvement that has led to a number of changes, including the following:

We have created a discount transparency program for public sector sales, ensuring that we require that our channel partners pass discounts on to government customers and that we tell these customers about the discounts provided for their benefit. The goal is to help ensure that the value of the discount isn’t used for improper purposes, which was the major concern in Hungary. We continue to work to improve this process to help ensure that customers gain the benefit of any discounts we provide. 

We’ve strengthened our anti-corruption program to meet the highest standards for such programs, including ISO 37001, the new Anti-Bribery Management System Standard. An independent organization accredited to conduct reviews under this standard has certified, based on all the work that we’ve done since these issues came to our attention, that our Hungarian subsidiary’s program meets ISO 37001.

We’ve increased our capability to prevent potential violations by using machine learning to help identify transactions and automatically flag those that pose heightened compliance risk. We now run billions of dollars of deals in 57 countries through this program and have a team apply additional scrutiny to these transactions. Not only are we committed to improving and expanding this program for our own use, we are offering our technology and know-how to other companies so that they can take advantage of it as well.”

During the investigation, the Order noted that “Microsoft’s cooperation included timely sharing of facts developed during the course of an internal investigation and voluntarily producing and translating documents.” The NPA provided additional clarity noting there were regular reports to the DOJ, production of international based documents in such a manner as not to impact foreign data privacy laws and the “collecting, analyzing, organizing and translating” of voluminous evidence and information for the Fraud Section.

The bottom line is that Microsoft moved forward aggressively and innovatively to investigate this matter and remediate the internal controls and other compliance failures.

From YouTube:

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – Album version (drum solo at 6:23 to 9:09)

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – Cover by Sina (drum solo at 6:29 to 9:13)

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – Ron Bushy live (drum solo at 1:12 to 5:32)

[View source.]