"Every company needs to do a self-audit of their noncompete clauses," Mr. Schachter said.
Ms. Norton was also a strong advocate of a "self-audit" Colorado law that allowed businesses to police their own environmental conduct.
The ending, which puts Jomier's self-audit into sharper relief, therefore comes not so much as an ironic twist as a necessary statement of account.
As attorney general, Ms. Norton was a strong advocate of Colorado's "self-audit" law, which grants companies amnesty from enforcement of federal air and water pollution laws if they police themselves.
Their argument is that if businesses are given incentives, like immunity from fines and prosecution, for reporting and cleaning up their own pollution, most will do the right thing -- a so-called self-audit.
As attorney general, Ms. Norton was a strong advocate of Colorado's "self-audit" law, which lets companies conduct voluntary audits to determine whether they are complying with environmental requirements.
A self-audit by councils following the killing of Victoria Climbié also revealed that there were 408 unallocated child protection cases spread between 34 councils, with much of the blame put on staff recruitment problems.
The disclosure of the self-audit reports would add to public knowledge on the extent to which a value-for-money service is being provided to the taxpayer, which is also in the public interest.
For 30 years, they've mostly disappointed each other and more or less gotten along; but they haven't forgotten those electric, subversive moments, those transformations that created the bond between them, and their self-audit schools us in the dynamics of the intermittent roilings beneath the surfaces of placid lives.
"The fund industry has spent more on compliance than virtually any other industry, and you would not know from the current scandal that they had benefited at all," said Debra M. Brown, president of Self-Audit, a consulting firm in Beverly, Mass., that helps companies test their compliance procedures.
In a 1996 speech, Ms. Norton criticized what she said had been the Clinton administration's challenges to Colorado's self-audit approach, including what she said had been a threat to cut off millions of dollars in federal assistance "because we had the audacity to adopt something in environmental area".
