The Justice Department certainly has altered the landscape of enforcement, compliance priorities, and ultimately corporate decisions surrounding voluntary disclosure.  It has become a little bit more complicated to sort out all the carrots and sticks.  One thing is clear – DOJ wants more companies to voluntarily disclose misconduct.  And that is understandable. DOJ does not want companies to wait until they receive a grand jury...

Even with the current focus on sanctions compliance, many companies have done little to assess and enhance their existing sanctions compliance program.  Instead, companies have stitched together a basic sanctions compliance program that centers on a screening tool and little beyond that.  Such a limited program provides just a  false comfort of compliance.  Many companies are not even conducting the mandated basic requirement of annual...

To restate the obvious – DOJ has prioritized prosecution of national security crimes.  For the business world, every company touches the international economy.  Even a domestic company might sell products or services outside the United States, or such companies depend on foreign products or services in their supply chain.  It is rare indeed to find a company that is not dependent on one way or...

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...

As we have noted on numerous occasions, the U.S. Russia Sanctions and Export Control Program is unprecedented and a compliance challenge for all organizations.   In another unprecedented action, the Justice Department and the Departments of Commerce and Treasury issued a Joint Compliance Note (“JCN”) on the importance of compliance with the Russia Sanctions and Export Control requirement, which provides important descriptions of red flags and...