Carmen Segarra worked for the Fed. Her expertise was helping big banks with the procedures and systems they need to comply with the many rules and regulations they face, here and overseas. She had done it for over a decade. She speaks four languages: French, Italian, Spanish, English. She’s currently learning Dutch. She has degrees from Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia, and studied international law at the Sorbonne. Her being hired coincided with an investigation by David Beim into the practices of the Fed following the 2008 financial disaster. Several of the points raised by Bein were that the Fed had experienced "capture" where employees became too close to the entities they were regulating. Another interesting problem was "consensus." There had developed in the Fed a feeling that uniformity was necessary within the system to come to conclusions fairly. This sounds very much like the problems that private corporations have with employees unwilling to step outside the usual area of company interest or process.
Segurra discovered that Goldman Sachs did not have any policy on conflict of interest when it advised El Paso Corporation on selling itself to Kinder Morgan, a company in which Goldman Sachs owned a US$4 billion stake, and with several former Goldman Sachs employees who had previously worked for Kinder Morgan on the El Paso team. She was pressured by her superiors at the Federal Reserve to alter her report, but stated that her professional view of the situation did not change, and refused to do so. Another problem involved Spanish Santander Bank which arranged for Goldman to hold some of its shares in its Brazilian subsidiary for some years, for a payment of about $40m, a swap Goldman said had Fed approval, but did not. This trade essentially hid Santander's vulnerable assets under Goldman's cloak, a very questionable procedure for which the Fed had no policy.
She was dismissed shortly after.
Segarra sued the Federal Reserve over her dismissal, but the case was dismissed for technical reasons, without considering its merits.
She made recordings of her discussions inside Goldman. And she sounds abrasive. But this is a huge problem that should be managed with more than personality analysis.
This is a link to a discussion: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL536_transcript.pdf
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