Senior Fellow Neil Barofsky
Neil M. Barofsky ('95) is a Senior Fellow at the Center. He is also an adjunct professor at the law school, and is affiliated with the Mitchell Jacobsen Leadership Program in Law and Business.
Prior to joining NYU, Barofsky was the first Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program ("SIGTARP"). He was nominated to the position by the President and confirmed by the Senate in late 2008, and was sworn into office on December 15, 2008.
As SIGTARP, Barofsky audited and investigated the purchase, management, and sale of assets under the $700 billion TARP program. Barofsky established the Office of the SIGTARP, and built it to a point where, at the time of his departure, it had 140 employees, had won criminal convictions of 18 people, helped keep $555 million in taxpayer funds from being lost to fraud, provided Treasury with 68 recommendations to protect taxpayers from losses in programs, and was continuing to work on 153 pending civil and criminal investigations, including 74 involving executives and senior officers at financial institutions who received or applied for TARP money.
Prior to serving as SIGTARP, Barofsky was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York for more than eight years. In that office, Barofsky prosecuted some of the most significant cases in the United States. He rose to be a Senior Trial Counsel who headed the Mortgage Fraud Group, which investigated and prosecuted all aspects of mortgage fraud, from retail mortgage fraud cases to investigations involving potential securities fraud with respect to collateralized debt obligations. Barofsky also had extensive experience as a line prosecutor leading white collar prosecutions during his tenure as a member of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Unit, which included the case that led to the conviction of the former President of Refco Inc., Tone Grant, and the guilty plea of Phillip Bennett, Refco’ s former Chief Executive Officer. Barofsky received the Attorney General’s John Marshall Award for his work on the Refco matter. Barofsky also led the investigation that resulted in the indictment of the top 50 leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on narcotics charges, a case described by the then Attorney General as the largest narcotics indictment filed in U.S. history.
Barofsky is a 1995 magna cum laude graduate of the New York University School of Law and a 1992 graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://www.law.nyu.edu//centers/adminofcriminallaw/facultyandstaff/neilbarofsky/index.htm