Featured Articles:

Corporate Culture: Monitor, Intervene and Remediate (Part III of III)

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...

Promoting Your Corporate Culture – Accountability and Messaging (Part II of III)

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...

Making Corporate Culture a Reality: Define and Embed (Part I of III)

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...

U.S. and International Partners Unveil New Code of Conduct Respecting Human Rights Concerns in Relation to Export Control Measures

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’s 2023 Hotline and Incident Management Report

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...

Episode 270 — DOJ Mandates Greater Cooperation Between CCOs and HR

The Justice Department’s recent emphasis on ethics and compliance culture, along with greater specificity on “consequence management” is a welcome breath of fresh air.  It is a policy coming for a long time and will bring about significant improvements.  Do not get me wrong – there will be bumps and bruises along the way, hurt egos and turf battles, but in the end HR and...

Uphold HQ Settles OFAC Violations for $72,230

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 OFAC Settlement Underscores Important Remedial Measures (Part II of II)

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...

Microsoft Pays OFAC and BIS Over $3.3 Million for Violations of Multiple Sanctions Programs (Part I of II)

OFAC announced only one settlement in the first three months of 2023.  Given its ongoing role in the implementation and enforcement of Russia Sanctions, OFAC’s enforcement record so far is completely understandable.  The situation changed, however, in the first week of April 2023 – OFAC announced two enforcement actions: a major action against Microsoft and another against Uphold HQ, Inc. (“Uphold”), a U.S. money service...

Episode 269 — Deep Dive into the Wells Fargo OFAC Sanctions Settlement

Wells Fargo added to its Grand Slam of Enforcement with its recent settlement of OFAC violations and paid $30 million to settle the matter. Wells Fargo’s violations occurred during a seven-year period, 2008 to 2015, and stemmed from its acquisition of Wachovia Bank.  Wells Fargo provided a foreign bank (part of predecessor Wachovia) with trade-finance software that Wachovia used to process trade financing transactions with...