All for One and One for All – The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas The famous swashbuckling adventure of The Three Musketeers should inspire chief compliance officers to pursue an important concept – the need for teamwork and collaboration is imperative for all compliance programs. We all know the pernicious effect that operational silos can create for CCOs and their need to collaborate with operational partners...
Say What You Mean and . . . Mean What [You] Say – The March Hare in Lewis Caroll’s, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Matt Axelrod, the Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement, at the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, must be grinning with satisfaction that BIS delivered, in a big way, after he warned businesses that BIS would be...
The Supreme Court rejected a challenge by Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, to its criminal prosecution for anti-money laundering violations and evasion of Iran Sanctions. In a 7-2 decision, authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court rejected Halkbank’s claim that it was immune from U.S. federal criminal prosecution. The Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Second Circuit to consider whether the common law...
Once defined, installed, and surrounded with a consequence management system, a corporate culture is not fixed in stone. To the contrary, as the business adapts through growth, innovation or in response to outside market and social forces, a company’s culture operates dynamically to reflect all of these influences. Change is inevitable for businesses (and for individuals in life). With this perspective, companies cannot just sit...
As a company’s most valuable intangible asset, we have witnessed the wreckage of companies that have fallen victim to reputational damage, scandal and ultimately the wasteland of a rotten corporate culture. In these situations, employee misconduct rates increase, wrongdoing and scandal surround the company, and corporate leaders ultimately fall from failing to sail the corporate ship in the right directions. There are tell-tale signs of...
Everyone has jumped on the corporate culture bandwagon. For some new converts, they like to espouse corporate culture as a recent discovery, or a new-fangled approach for compliance programs. The story of corporate culture as a talismanic tool for ethics and compliance is really nothing new. Chief compliance officers knew the importance of corporate culture from the beginning. A number of companies separately called out...
Alex Cotoia, Regulatory Manager at The Volkov Law Group, rejoins us for a posting on the recent international adoption of a human rights code of conduct. Alex can be reached at [email protected]. On March 30, 2023, the United States Department of State announced the adoption—in conjunction with a host of international partners—of a specific Code of Conduct related to human rights considerations in the context...
NAVEX Global always provides insightful and important whitepapers and annual reports. One of the more important annual reports is NAVEX’s Hotline and Incident Management Report. Given Navex’s important position in the hotline and employee reporting industry, its annual report includes trends on employee reporting, substantiation rates, and categories of reporting. NAVEX Global analyzes its vast database of ethics hotlines, totaling more than 1.52 million reports...
Uphold is a California-based money service business. Uphold agreed to pay OFAC $72,230 to resolve multiple sanctions program violations. Between March 2017 and Maay 2022, Uphold and its affiliates processed 152 transactions totaling $180,5765 in violation of the Iran, Cuba and Venezuela sanctions programs. The customers involved in the illegal transactions self-identified as being located in Cuba or Iran and for employees of the Venezuela...
Microsoft’s remedial steps provide important best-practices for companies facing similar risk factors in the global economy, especially for global software companies that rely on Internet-based operations. According to OFAC, Microsoft demonstrated a reckless disregard for U.S. sanctions by failing to identify that over a seven-year period, more than $12,000,000 worth of software and services were exported from the United States through Microsoft systems and servers...
