It may seem like a Herculean task — but it can be done.  I regularly opine that mitigating sanctions risks for your third-party population is an easier task than doing so for your anti-corruption risks.  One big reason — geography is an important limiter on sanctions risks.  The ability to evade sanctions has to be financially practicable — for example, it makes no sense to...

While OFAC’s enforcement actions and guidance points to important steps exporters must take when relying on third-party distributors and other intermediaries, the “reason to know” and affirmative obligations to monitor resale and distribution of products to ultimate users does not appear to be unreasonable or impractical.  In terms of best practices, these are issues that need to be addressed. The supply chain and third-party risk...

If you give a Chief Compliance Officer truth serum and ask him/her whether they believe a risk assessment is valuable, what do you think the CCO say? Let’s start with the cynical side – not that I am a pessimist. Many CCOs will candidly tell you that a risk assessment provides them with a colorful and expensive report on the company’s risks that contains no...

Chief compliance officers face imposing tasks on a daily basis. The tasks often look insurmountable and it is easy for CCOs to just turn away and find a more manageable set of tasks. Compliance requires resources and those resources are not limitless. In other words, a CCO has to decide how to allocate limited resources. A CCO has to be an efficiency expert, especially when...

This week I am posting a series on due diligence.  Also, I just released a new e-book on due diligence which can be downloaded here. There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded. – Mark Twain In a former life (or even present life), Mark Twain had to...