Donna Boehme is our guest on this week’s podcast.  She is an advocate for an independent, and empowered Chief Compliance Officer. Donna is an internationally recognized authority in the field of organizational compliance and ethics with over 20 years’ experience designing and managing compliance and ethics solutions, within the US and globally. As Principal of Compliance Strategists LLC, she has advised a wide spectrum of private,...

These are inspiring times for the compliance profession.  Looking back on the last ten years, it is amazing to observe the growth and influence of the compliance profession.  Many of the original advocates for the compliance profession must be impressed.  Corporate leaders are now embracing a new mantra – ethics and compliance. Business ethics is a new focus and language all to itself. At the...

Chief compliance officers are politicians and have to possess great interpersonal skills. They have to “get along” and persuade key constituencies — most especially their business partners – to commit and devote time and resources to ethics and compliance. In order to operationalize their programs, CCOs have to build relationships with important partners – human resources, legal, internal audit, procurement, and finance. Up to this...

It is easy to say something and convince yourself it is true. As George Costanza advised Jerry Seinfeld when Jerry had to take a polygraph examination when he failed to admit that he watched  “Melrose Place,” “Remember Jerry.  It’s  not a lie, if you believe it.” See Video Here. This statement from this Seinfeld episode (Season 6, Episode 16) reminds me of compliance professionals who...

Compliance officers have a tough job. In most cases, they are overworked, under-resourced, and accountable for significant risks and issues. In the recent compliance vernacular, a CCO has to “operationalize” the company’s compliance program. That requires a CCO to go out and make friends inside the company. CCOs have “natural” friends – legal, internal audit, human resources, and security – which share many common objectives...

I recently wrote an article for Corporate Compliance Insights, “Top 5 Mistakes Chief Compliance Officers Make (And How to Avoid Them).  Here is a link to the article. Thank you to Corporate Compliance Insights for its support!!

Everyone likes to cite and talk about the list of horrible scandals. Whether it is Enron, WorldCom, Siemens, GM, VW, Wells Fargo, we pick through the details, cite failures and use it as a springboard to a discussion of higher ideals and performance. Call it a reminder of worst-case scenarios. The rise in the chief compliance officer is based on the need for corporations to...

While reading the Embraer settlement documents, I read over the facts implicating a senior legal executive and his/her involvement in the Embraer bribery scheme. Truthfully, I had a slight gasp as I read about a fellow lawyer crossing the line – from lawful to unlawful. Not only did the Embraer legal executive know about the bribery scheme, the executive was the one who came up...