One of the most pressing corporate governance issues revealed in the Global Financial Crisis was the prevalence of ‘creative compliance,’ a term coined by the Edinburgh-based socio-legal academic Doreen McBarnet to describe technical compliance with legal and regulatory requirements but derogation from their underpinning rationale. Since the collapse of Enron and other major corporations in the accounting scandals at the turn of the millennium, prosecutors have embarked on a range of aggressive ‘creative enforcement’ strategies. Creative enforcement refers to innovative legal strategies used by prosecutors to secure corporate behavioural change. Circumventing the necessity of going to trial, these measures often take the form of negotiated consent orders or, more problematically, deferred or non-prosecution agreements, which can include appointment of external monitors. Using these methods to hold executives accountable under the current legal and regulatory framework remains challenging, as the civil litigation taken and subsequently settled by the SEC against Goldman Sachs makes clear (SEC v Goldman Sachs & Co and Fabrice Tourre). The SEC’s Director of Enforcement, Robert Khuzami, claimed that the settlement sent ‘a stark lesson to Wall Street firms that no product is too complex, and no investor too sophisticated, to avoid a heavy price if a firm violates the fundamental principles of honest treatment and fair dealing.’ It remains an open question, however, whether the management of the Goldman Sachs case—or indeed the agency’s general approach to enforcement—presents evidence of the possibility of substantive change in either the internal governance or external policing of Wall Street.  One influential judge, Jed Rakoff has argued that the strategies risk privileging 'the facade of enforcement.' This series examines the changing nature of neogitiated prosecution.