OFAC fined an unnamed U.S. consultant just over $1.4 million for Iran sanctions violations tied to advisory work provided to a leading Iranian software company, and this case deserves careful attention because it demolishes a defense I still hear surprisingly often: the idea that providing remote advice, strategic guidance, or consulting services to an Iranian business, without physically operating in Iran or directly running the...

The Justice Department announced a settlement with Honeywell Aerospace requiring the company to pay $2,042,518 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by failing to meet cybersecurity requirements built into a Department of Defense contract. This case adds to a growing body of enforcement actions confirming that DOJ’s Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative is not slowing down, and it’s a useful reminder that cybersecurity...

KPMG just released its 2026 Global Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Survey, drawing on responses from 725 CCOs, and the framing KPMG chose for the report tells you most of what you need to know before you even get to the data: “Feeling the pressure: A new reality for compliance leaders.” That’s not marketing language. It reflects a genuine shift in what the compliance function...

The UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation fined Citibank’s London branch roughly 4.7 million pounds, about $6.4 million, for violating Russia sanctions, and this case deserves close attention from every financial institution compliance team, not because the violations were exotic or novel, but because they weren’t. This is a case study in ordinary operational failure at scale: screening systems that missed a name variant, alert...

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis has rejected the Justice Department’s request to drop the remaining bribery and obstruction of justice charges against executives connected to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s conglomerate, and this ruling deserves attention well beyond the Adani matter itself. It’s a rare and pointed example of a federal court refusing to simply accept a prosecutor’s word that dismissal is warranted, and it raises...

Part 1 of this series walked through the settlement terms and the sheer range of violations DDTC documented against BAE Systems, spanning unlicensed technical data exports, unauthorized defense services, agreement mismanagement, and documentation failures. In Part 2, we focus on what actually caused all of this, because DDTC’s charging letter is unusually candid about root causes, and those root causes are far more instructive than...

If your organization does not yet have a written AI Acceptable Use Policy, I can tell you exactly what is happening inside your walls right now: employees are already using AI tools, whether you have authorized it or not. They are pasting documents into chatbots to summarize them, asking generative AI to draft correspondence, running research queries, and increasingly relying on AI features quietly embedded...