Neil Barofsky is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. From December 2008 until March 2011 Mr. Barofsky served as the Special Inspector General for the $700 billion U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out the U.S. banking system in 2008.
In his role as Inspector General, Mr. Barofsky identified and prosecuted waste, fraud and abuse on the part of companies that received bailout funds. The Special Inspector General’s office (SIGTARP) filed fraud charges against 91 individuals including 64 in senior executive roles, recovered over $160 million in assets, and saved 553 million taxpayer dollars by preventing TARP funds from wrongfully going to Colonial Bank.
Barofsky has been recognized for his courage and willingness to stand up to the most powerful people and institutions in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street and for his relentless criticism of U.S. Treasury Department officials, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Prior to his role as Inspector General, Barofsky served as 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, he headed the Mortgage Fraud Unit and worked in the Securities & Commodities Fraud Unit. In the latter, Barofsky led white collar crime prosecutions including the case that led to the conviction of Refco Inc. executives. For his work on the Refco case, he earned the U.S. Attorney General’s John Marshall Award.
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 – the largest narcotics indictment filed in U.S. history.
He is the author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, a behind-the-scenes account of the 2008 financial bailouts.
