For years, forced labor risk sat comfortably in the sustainability and corporate responsibility part of the organization. It showed up in an annual ESG report, maybe a supplier code of conduct, and rarely made it onto the desk of a CFO. That era is over. Forced labor exposure is now a direct line item risk, capable of inflating cost of goods sold, freezing inventory at...
You think you can cheat the government? The False Claims Act says you’ll pay for it three times. The 2026 False Claims Act mid-year numbers are out, and the story is clear. DOJ isn’t backing down. It’s leaning in. DOJ is using the False Claims Act (FCA) to drive administration policy priorities. In the first half of this year alone, it notched first-ever settlements in...
In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov examines the compliance risks lurking in ordinary U.S.-Mexico cross-border trade, explaining how the plaza system allows cartels to function as a de facto taxing authority over certain border corridors, extracting piso payments from legitimate commercial shipments that pass through their territory, often through customs brokers and logistics providers who absorb and disguise the cost as...
When using AI in your internal investigation, make sure you protect the attorney-client privilege. A lot of investigators are feeding interview notes, documents, even witness statements into AI tools to help organize an investigation. That’s convenient, for sure, but ask yourself: where does that data go? Is that platform actually covered by your privilege log? Did outside counsel direct that use, or did an investigator...
Part one of this series examined how Mexican cartels function as a de facto taxing authority over certain border corridors, ports, and crossings, and how legitimate-looking fees paid to customs brokers and logistics providers can conceal payments that ultimately benefit criminal organizations. This second installment turns to what compliance programs actually need to do about it. If your company moves goods across the U.S.-Mexico border,...
There is a hard truth that compliance officers overseeing Mexico operations need to internalize, and it is the same truth prosecutors have started building into recent enforcement actions: at many points along the U.S.-Mexico border, cartels function as a de facto taxing authority. Goods, cash, and people do not move through certain crossings, ports, and corridors without someone, somewhere in that chain, paying a fee...
The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced a new specialized unit inside its Enforcement Division dedicated specifically to accounting and financial reporting fraud, and the announcement is worth reading closely, not just for what the unit will do, but for what its creation says about how the agency is currently defining its own enforcement priorities. A New Unit With a Specific Mandate The unit will...
In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov explains why forced labor compliance has shifted from a sustainability afterthought into a direct financial and operational threat. He walks through the U.S. Trade Representative’s new two-tier Section 301 tariff structure targeting 60 trading partner economies over forced labor practices, the rebuttable presumption under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that can freeze finished goods...
When you’re conducting an internal investigation and using AI as a tool, you’re risking the use of a shifty informant. Let’s talk about a risk that I’m seeing firsthand in internal investigations: AI hallucination. I use AI in my own practice, and I got scared very quickly because it cited cases that don’t exist. It cited them confidently, persuasively, like it was reading straight off...
Ethisphere and Ethena just released a research report that every compliance officer should read carefully, not because it breaks new ground on AI risk, but because it turns the mirror around and asks an uncomfortable question: if ethics and compliance is the function writing the rules for how everyone else uses AI, why is it the function using AI the least itself? The report, based...
