In the compliance world, no news is not good news. Let me ask you a question every CCO should be asking right now: Are your employees actually reporting and using your hotline to report legitimate concerns? Too many compliance officers look at a quiet hotline and breathe a sigh of relief. No calls, no complaints. Must mean everything’s fine. I’m here to tell you that’s...
In my last post, I made the affirmative case for CCO empowerment — a direct reporting line to the CEO and a dotted line to the audit committee. Today I want to address the disturbing counter-trend: companies moving compliance back under the general counsel, often justified as cost discipline or organizational simplification. Make no mistake about what this movement represents. It is a retreat from...
Parts 1 and 2 of this series covered the terms of The Scoular Company’s deferred prosecution agreement and the mechanics of the bribery scheme itself, a six-year pattern of $2,000 payments per train, dressed up as reinspection fees, paid through customs brokers to keep contaminated agricultural shipments moving across the U.S.-Mexico border. In this final installment, we draw out the practical lessons for compliance officers,...
In Part 1 of this series, we outlined the terms of The Scoular Company’s deferred prosecution agreement and how DOJ applied its Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy to the case. In Part 2, we go deeper into the facts themselves, because the mechanics of this scheme, and the specific control gaps that allowed it to run for six years, are exactly the kind of...
The Justice Department’s foreign bribery resolution with The Scoular Company, an Omaha, Nebraska-based agricultural supply chain company, is one of the more unusual FCPA cases in recent memory. It did not arise from a company chasing a government contract or a licensing decision abroad. It arose from routine cross-border logistics, corn and other agricultural shipments moving from the United States into Mexico, and a bribery...
In the compliance world, no news is not good news. Let me ask you a question every CCO should be asking right now: Are your employees actually reporting and using your hotline to report legitimate concerns? Too many compliance officers look at a quiet hotline and breathe a sigh of relief. No calls, no complaints. Must mean everything’s fine. I’m here to tell you that’s...
In my last post, I made the affirmative case for CCO empowerment — a direct reporting line to the CEO and a dotted line to the audit committee. Today I want to address the disturbing counter-trend: companies moving compliance back under the general counsel, often justified as cost discipline or organizational simplification. Make no mistake about what this movement represents. It is a retreat from...
Parts 1 and 2 of this series covered the terms of The Scoular Company’s deferred prosecution agreement and the mechanics of the bribery scheme itself, a six-year pattern of $2,000 payments per train, dressed up as reinspection fees, paid through customs brokers to keep contaminated agricultural shipments moving across the U.S.-Mexico border. In this final installment, we draw out the practical lessons for compliance officers,...
In Part 1 of this series, we outlined the terms of The Scoular Company’s deferred prosecution agreement and how DOJ applied its Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy to the case. In Part 2, we go deeper into the facts themselves, because the mechanics of this scheme, and the specific control gaps that allowed it to run for six years, are exactly the kind of...
The Justice Department’s foreign bribery resolution with The Scoular Company, an Omaha, Nebraska-based agricultural supply chain company, is one of the more unusual FCPA cases in recent memory. It did not arise from a company chasing a government contract or a licensing decision abroad. It arose from routine cross-border logistics, corn and other agricultural shipments moving from the United States into Mexico, and a bribery...
Michael Volkov examines how artificial intelligence is transforming internal investigations — and what the Justice Department now expects from companies navigating this new landscape. Michael breaks down DOJ’s updated Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs, which directs prosecutors to scrutinize how companies assess AI risks, whether compliance functions have adequate access to data and analytics resources, and what controls prevent the reckless misuse of new technologies....
Every so often, corporate governance debates that we thought were settled come roaring back. The reporting line for the chief compliance officer is one of them. For years, the trend line pointed in the right direction — more companies elevating the CCO to report directly to the CEO, with independent access to the board. Lately, I am seeing troubling signs of backsliding, with companies quietly...
The root of every strong compliance program is a strong culture. I say this on every episode, and I’m going to keep saying it. Culture is the single most important control that your compliance program builds. It’s at the heart of every compliance program—not the policy binder, not the training module. Culture. Here’s what the research really shows: companies with strong ethical cultures perform better...
The individual prosecutions now flowing out of the TD Bank money laundering scandal are a reminder that institutional control failures are ultimately executed, or ignored, one employee at a time. This week, U.S. District Judge Esther Salas sentenced former TD Bank assistant manager Wilfredo Aquino to 46 months in prison and three years of probation for his role in a money laundering conspiracy that moved...
The SEC’s latest enforcement action against Merrill Lynch is a reminder that a transaction monitoring system is only as good as the calibration behind it. On July 1, 2026, Merrill agreed to pay a $7.5 million civil penalty, accept a censure, and consent to a cease-and-desist order to settle SEC charges that it failed to file numerous Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) between April 2020 and...
