Corruption Crime & Compliance

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  Can You Get Off the SDN List? 10.09.2026 1мин

  Has OFAC branded your company with the scarlet letter?Getting removed from the SDN list is possible, but it’s not fast, it’s not easy, and it’s not guaranteed.The primary path is a petition for administrative reconsideration filed with OFAC, arguing mistaken identity, changed circumstances, or that the original factual basis was simply wrong.You must prove it with real documented evidence.OFAC is skeptical of cosmetic restructurings designed to look like change while control remains the same.Practically, petitions can take many months to over a year, and you’re often arguing against evidence you’ll never fully see, since designations can rest on classified information.If OFAC denies or ignores your petition, you can challenge it in federal court, but courts defer heavily to the executive on sanctions, so litigation is a last resort, not a strategy.If you’re designated, get experienced OFAC counsel immediately, do a real internal investigation, build your remediation story, and manage expectations. It takes time.The best strategy is never needing this. Build a sanctions program rigorous enough that you never end up on the list at all.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 448: Caremark in 2026 — Where Delaware Draws the Line Between Bad Judgment and Bad Faith 09.09.2026 11мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov examines how Delaware's Caremark doctrine has matured through a recent run of decisions involving Teligent, Regions Financial, and Boeing, all centered on the question of when a board's failure to prevent corporate misconduct crosses from ordinary mismanagement into an actual breach of the duty of loyalty. He walks through Teligent's officer-level oversight failures in FDA compliance, Regions Financial's lesson that a whistleblower investigation without genuine follow-through and remediation doesn't satisfy Caremark's good-faith standard, and the pivotal 2026 Boeing dismissal, where extensive board and committee engagement on safety protected directors even after another serious incident. The episode closes with practical guidance for compliance officers on identifying mission-critical risks, building real escalation and follow-up procedures, and documenting board oversight, since Caremark, as these cases confirm, does not demand perfection, only a good-faith effort to oversee the risks that genuinely matter.
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  Is Your Sanctions Screening Enough? 08.09.2026 1мин

  Are you rubbing elbows with criminals?When OFAC designates someone a specially designated national, or SDN, it’s not a warning label. It’s a legal wall.Every asset that party has anywhere in U.S. jurisdiction, or in the hands of a U.S. person, is frozen. Every U.S. person is barred from transacting with them, directly or indirectly.The trap is OFAC’s 50% rule, which means any entity owned 50% or more in aggregate by blocked persons is automatically blocked too, even if it never appears on the published list.A clean name screen doesn’t mean a clean counterparty if you haven’t traced the ownership behind it.Enforcement is ratcheting up hard right now: Iran-related designations, cartel terrorism, Russia sanctions and evasion networks. The stakes are real - civil penalties in the tens of millions, frozen wires, correspondent banking risk, and secondary sanctions that can cut even non-U.S. companies off from the dollar system entirely.Sanctions screening can’t be a one-time check-the-box exercise.You need ongoing, ownership-aware screening that re-screens existing counterparties as the list evolves and actually traces beneficial ownership, not just the name on the contract.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 447 -- Veloxis Pharmaceuticals' $46 Million Kickback Settlement and What the CEP Really Rewards 06.09.2026 7мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov breaks down Veloxis Pharmaceuticals' more than $46 million settlement with DOJ and HHS-OIG over a years-long kickback scheme involving its kidney transplant drug Envarsus XR, a scheme the DPA says was directed in part by the company's own former CEO. He examines why Veloxis avoided prosecution and instead secured a deferred prosecution agreement under DOJ's Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy despite executive-level involvement in the misconduct, crediting the company's disclosure, cooperation, and termination of the responsible executives. The episode also unpacks the financial breakdown across civil, criminal, and Sunshine Act penalties, and closes with a detailed look at the structural compliance overhaul required under Veloxis's five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement, including a compliance officer mandated to report independently of legal and finance directly to the CEO and board.
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  When You Fail to Fix an Already Flagged Compliance Gap 03.09.2026 1мин

  At $125 million, breaking the law can never be a cost of doing business.UBS Bank was hit with a $125 million FinCEN penalty, the largest ever against a broker-dealer under the Bank Secrecy Act.This is UBS’s second Bank Secrecy Act action in less than a decade. In 2018, regulators told UBS: fix your foreign currency wire monitoring. It never did.The same gap stayed open for years, letting more than $10 billion in transactions move through unchecked.Layered on top, UBS failed to properly vet high-risk customers tied to Russia and Latin America, even after one of its own affiliates raised internal concerns about their sources of wealth.That warning went nowhere. UBS admitted it acted willfully and intentionally.Now, what’s the lesson? A prior enforcement action isn’t the end of the story. Regulators check whether you actually fixed what they flagged, and unfixed gaps read as willful the second time.High-risk geography demands ongoing monitoring, not a one-time onboarding check, and no institution’s size or reputation buys protection.UBS is one of the most respected private banks in the world, and that bought it nothing here but headaches.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 446 -- L3Harris's CEO Ouster and the Board Governance Lesson Nobody Learns the First Time 01.09.2026 8мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov examines L3Harris Technologies' abrupt ouster of chairman and CEO Christopher Kubasik over a code-of-conduct violation, and why the story is really a board governance cautionary tale rather than a typical enforcement matter. He traces Kubasik's earlier, similar departure from Lockheed Martin in 2012 alongside comparable cases involving Brian Krzanich at Intel and Mark Hurd at Hewlett-Packard, both of whom went on to lead other companies despite prior conduct violations, to explore why boards keep extending second chances to executives with this kind of history. The episode unpacks the distinction boards draw between personal-conduct issues and conduct that creates genuine enterprise risk, and argues that thorough vetting must translate into a documented, ongoing risk-mitigation plan rather than a one-time pass/fail judgment made during the hiring process, since, as L3Harris just learned, history has a way of repeating itself.
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  Could Your Routine Customs Payment Actually Be a Bribe? 01.09.2026 1мин

  Is your routine payment actually a bribe?Scolar, an Omaha agricultural company, resolved an FCPA case for over $10 million after using customs brokers to bribe Mexican officials, about $2,000 for each train that crossed the border. It was invoiced as reinspection fees paid routinely for six years.Nobody asked what the money actually bought.Stop treating customs brokers, freight forwarders, and logistics providers like ordinary vendors. They interact directly with foreign officials on your behalf, and that makes them high-risk third parties, deserving the same scrutiny as a sales agent or government relations consultant.Test your recurring fees, your routine fees. Any charge that repeats, described in vague language - reinspection, expediting, special handling - should trigger one question every time: can we prove exactly what the payment was for?If not, that’s your red flag, regardless of the dollar amount.Small, consistent, unexplained fees at the border are exactly how bribery hides.Go look at your own customs and logistics payments this week.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 445 -- Why Your Organization Needs an AI Acceptable Use Policy 30.08.2026 9мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov makes the case that every organization needs a written AI Acceptable Use Policy now, not eventually, because employees are already using AI tools with or without formal governance. He walks through the three core risk categories driving that urgency: confidentiality exposure when employees submit sensitive data to ungoverned tools, hallucination risk from AI-generated content that can be fabricated yet fully convincing, and vendor risk from the multi-layered data relationships that come with adopting a third-party AI product. He then breaks down what a genuinely effective policy needs to include: clear governance ownership, a real (not rubber-stamp) vendor due diligence process reassessed at least annually, data classification tied directly to tool approval, verification requirements built into actual workflows rather than left as aspirational language, and a no-retaliation incident reporting process that surfaces problems early instead of driving them underground.
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  Can Your Biggest FCPA Risk Be a Trusted Insider? 27.08.2026 1мин

  Have you heard about the Goldman Sachs banker who bribed his way to a conviction?A federal jury in Brooklyn last week convicted Asante Berko, a former Goldman Sachs executive, on FCPA conspiracy, a substantive FCPA violation, and money laundering conspiracy.Berko managed a deal between a Turkish energy company and the government of Ghana to build a new power plant in Ghana. To win the bid, he and his co-conspirators paid more than a million dollars in bribes to Ghanaian officials, including a planned payment to the Minister of Power using the code word “Holy Reign” in their communications for the payoffs.Berko didn’t need an outside fixer. He lied directly to Goldman’s own compliance team and moved his real conversations to a personal email account.He laundered the money through shell companies, sham invoices, and nominee accounts.The lesson: your biggest FCPA risk isn’t always the outsider, the third party who hasn’t been vetted. Sometimes it’s the trusted insider lying straight to your compliance function.Goldman wasn’t charged and cooperated fully, but this shows why verification, not just trust, has to be built into how you vet high-value cross-border deals.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Is Trade Fraud the Next Major False Claims Act Risk? 25.08.2026 1мин

  If you think your company can smuggle and fly under the radar screen, think again.When your company touches imports, customs, or tariffs, you need to know this.The Justice Department stood up a dedicated trade fraud task force in August of last year. Its first settlement came three months later.This past May, it delivered the largest customs-related False Claims Act recovery ever: $550 million from aluminum companies and their warehouses.A week later, two steel companies paid $19 million for misrepresenting Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Turkish, and Vietnamese steel as Canadian or American-made.Underpaying customs duties you legitimately owe is a reverse false claim, meaning it’s a False Claims Act case with triple damages and whistleblowers ready to report you.As tariffs climb, so does the incentive to misdeclare country of origin, and DOJ now has a dedicated task force and a whistleblower bar ready and good at spotting those situations.If trade compliance isn’t in your risk assessment right now, fix that immediately.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 444 -- BAE Systems' $36 Million ITAR Wake-Up Call 23.08.2026 8мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov breaks down the State Department's $36 million settlement with BAE Systems, Inc. over more than 100 alleged violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and Arms Export Control Act spanning 2019 through March 2025, including unlicensed technical data exports to China, Canada, the U.K., and Germany, unauthorized defense services in Italy, France, and Indonesia, and a shipping mix-up that sent a fully controlled engine component to Switzerland in place of a properly licensed part. Despite BAE self-disclosing the vast majority of violations and cooperating fully with DDTC's investigation, avoiding debarment as a result, Volkov highlights the agency's pointed finding that BAE's compliance program lacked the integration to translate earlier corrective actions into lasting fixes, with violations continuing to recur even after a 2021 internal audit prompted real remediation efforts. The episode walks through specific fact patterns showing how insufficient training, high compliance staff turnover, inadequate export management software, and reliance on junior personnel for high-risk judgment calls combined to produce a sprawling pattern of violations, and closes with practical lessons for any export-controlled company: build control warnings directly into operational systems, treat compliance staff turnover as an enterprise risk, route licensing judgment calls to genuinely experienced personnel, extend verification controls all the way to the shipping dock, and ensure remediation after an audit addresses root causes rather than just visible symptoms.
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  Where Is DOJ Taking False Claims Act Enforcement Next? 20.08.2026 1мин

  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 FCA (False Claims Act) to drive administration policy priorities. In the first half of this year alone, it notched first-ever settlements in four distinct areas: gender-related care, the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative targeting DEI practices in federal contracting, a Medicare Advantage settlement from the DOJ-HHS Working Group, and trade and customs fraud.Four new enforcement lanes, all producing real settlements within a year of being announced. Expect sustained activity in all four.There’s a data story too. Qui tam filings by whistleblowers are surging - nearly 1,300 in fiscal year 2025 - and by data miners, who are now filing more than 45% of whistleblower actions.DOJ just launched a new initiative to engage with and vet those data miners’ methodology.Don’t read a quieter news cycle as a quieter DOJ. The FCA is more active than ever, just pointed at new targets.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 443 -- Nothing Crosses the Border for Free 19.08.2026 8мин

  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 routine fees. Drawing on The Scoular Company's FCPA resolution, in which bribes paid to Mexican officials to clear failed agricultural inspections were later found to have partly benefited a border cartel without the company's knowledge, Volkov explains how the government's designation of major cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations has activated material support liability under the Anti-Terrorism Act, exposing companies to cartel-related risk regardless of intent or awareness. He closes with a practical compliance roadmap: reclassifying customs brokers and logistics providers as high-risk third parties, sharpening due diligence beyond standard sanctions screening, testing the substance behind every recurring border-related payment, building and actually enforcing audit rights, giving compliance real visibility into operational payment data, and breaking down the silos between sanctions, anti-money laundering, and anti-corruption teams so that cartel-linked risk doesn't fall through the cracks between them.
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  Could AI Use Waive Privilege in Your Internal Investigation? 18.08.2026 1мин

  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 just start using a public AI tool because it was faster?You wouldn’t just hand out your interview notes to third parties who are not under privilege. That’s what AI can do, unbeknownst to you.If the answer is unclear, you may have just created a discoverable record that sits outside the protection of attorney-client privilege or work product doctrine.Opposing counsel or a regulator can ask what tools you used, what prompts you entered, and what the AI generated.If that trail wasn’t properly walled off under privileged attorney-client use, you may have to produce it.And there’s a second failure mode: shadow AI. Investigators using unapproved tools on their own, without telling anyone, to save time.You won’t find out until it surfaces in a document request.My advice: before your next investigation starts, define exactly which AI tools are approved, who directs their use, and how that use is documented and protected.Get ahead of it, because opposing counsel is already asking the question.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 442 -- When Forced Labor Risk Hits the P&L 16.08.2026 8мин

  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 at the border over a single noncompliant sub-tier component, illustrated by a real case where thousands of finished luxury vehicles were impounded because of one blacklisted electronic part, and the EU's forthcoming forced labor regulation, which will allow European authorities to block imports, pull products from shelves, and order their disposal starting in late 2027. Volkov argues that these overlapping pressures require companies to abandon simplistic, country-based risk scoring in favor of a residual-risk approach that accounts for how mature and verifiable a supplier's actual labor controls are, and he outlines the specific warning signs of coercion, debt bondage, document confiscation, wage manipulation, forced overtime, and deceptive subcontracting, that a credible due diligence program must be trained to detect. The episode closes with a practical call to action: build an honest baseline of where supply chain risk is concentrated today and use it to prioritize a due diligence program capable of producing real evidence, not just policy documents, before regulators or customs officials come asking.
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  Can You Trust AI During an Internal Investigation? 13.08.2026 1мин

  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 a court docket. It wasn’t.Now imagine that inside an internal investigation. You’re using an AI tool to summarise witness interviews, to search a document universe, to draft findings for audit committees.If that tool fabricates a fact, misattributes a quote, or invents a document that was never produced and nobody catches it, that error doesn’t stay contained.It becomes your investigative record. It becomes the basis for a disciplinary decision, a self-disclosure to a regulator, maybe even a certification to the government that your findings are accurate.Here’s the rule I put in place today: every AI-assisted output in an investigation gets independently verified against the underlying source material.Not spot-checked. Verified.Because the day you rely on an AI summary you never checked is the day that your investigation’s credibility, and maybe your own, is on the line.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 441 -- Severin Wirz on his New Book, "Bribery Beyond Borders: A History of the FCPA" 12.08.2026 53мин

  On the Corruption, Crime and Compliance podcast, host Mike interviews Severin Wirtz, an in-house compliance lawyer (now at a semiconductor company, formerly at Trace International and a law firm where he cut his teeth on the Bonny Island FCPA case) about his new book, Bribery Beyond Borders, a history of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that took him nearly fifteen years to research and write. Wirtz argues the FCPA is usually reduced to a footnote of Watergate, when in fact it emerged from decades of prior anti-bribery legal tradition, Cold War fears that corrupt American multinationals (like ITT in Chile) were undermining democracy and fueling Soviet propaganda, and a narrow, contingent political path through Congress — driven by figures like Senator Frank Church, SEC enforcement chief Stanley Sporkin (who leaked findings to Congress after being blocked by Kissinger's State Department), and later William Proxmire, with Ford and even Carter only lukewarm supporters until the "Watergate babies" swept into Congress. The conversation moves to today's landscape: the Trump administration's 2025 pause on FCPA enforcement, the DOJ's new "national interest" enforcement standard, debate over prosecuting foreign officials who receive bribes (Wirtz is wary of the precedent), the emerging cartel-linked corruption cases like the Mexican Vitol/Scolar-type matter, and Wirtz's view that the statute is at an "inflection point" moving from a post-Cold War globalist rationale toward a new argument centered on fair competition and America's geopolitical brand versus China. Both agree corruption concerns are cyclical and likely to resurface domestically before circling back to FCPA enforcement. The book is available through Corporate Compliance Insights (publisher) and major retailers.
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  Are You Looking for DOJ Enforcement in the Wrong Place? 11.08.2026 1мин

  If you’re looking at the Justice Department and only at FCPA cases, you’re looking in the wrong place.Everyone’s talking about the DOJ going soft on corporate crime. I want to push back on that narrative because I think it’s incomplete and, honestly, a little dangerous if compliance officers believe it.Yes, traditional FCPA and bribery prosecutions have slowed. But look at where the resources are actually going.Trade enforcement is exploding. Sanctions enforcement is aggressive and getting more aggressive by the month.And here’s the one that should really get your attention: the False Claims Act is now being used against companies for tariff circumvention and customs fraud, with qui tam relators and lawyers lining up to bring those cases.This isn’t a retreat. It’s a reallocation.DOJ has simply moved its firepower to where the current priorities sit: national security, trade, tariffs, sanctions, and export controls.If your compliance program is still built around FCPA risk and you haven’t retooled for trade and sanctions exposure, you are exposed right now, today.Update your risk assessment. This is not the moment to stand down.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.
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  Episode 440-- Chris Focacci: AI, Due Diligence, and the Limits of Machine Judgment 09.08.2026 40мин

  In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov sits down with Christian Focacci, founder of Threat Digital, for their annual check-in on AI's evolving role in due diligence and compliance. Focacci traces how AI adoption has matured from early hype and generic chatbot rollouts to more disciplined, use-case-specific tooling, while cautioning that the underlying models still hallucinate and should never be treated as an authoritative source rather than a reviewer of externally cited, verifiable information. The conversation covers the widespread problem of "shadow AI" use inside organizations without governance, the risks of letting AI creep into discretionary decision-making without human accountability, and emerging third-party risk questions as companies must now vet how vendors themselves are using AI. Volkov and Focacci also discuss the rapid rise of open-weight Chinese models, the regulatory patchwork forming at the state level (particularly around HR uses of AI), and the risk of regulatory capture favoring large AI incumbents over smaller innovators. The episode closes on a balanced note: AI is genuinely valuable for processing large data sets, triaging sanctions alerts, and boosting productivity, but only when paired with rigorous human oversight, clear documentation, and citations traceable back to verifiable source material.
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  Has DOJ Enforcement Shifted Rather Than Slowed Down? 06.08.2026 1мин

  Everyone’s talking about the DOJ going soft on crime.I want to push back on that narrative because I think it’s incomplete and, honestly, a little dangerous if compliance officers believe it.Yes, traditional FCPA and bribery prosecutions have slowed, but look at where the resources actually went. Trade enforcement is exploding. Sanctions enforcement is aggressive and getting more aggressive by the month.And here’s the one that should really get your attention: the False Claims Act is now being used aggressively against companies for tariff circumvention and customs fraud, with qui tam relators lining up to bring those cases.This isn’t a retreat. It’s a reallocation.DOJ has simply moved its firepower to where the current priorities sit: trade, tariffs, sanctions, export controls, and national security.If your compliance program is still built entirely around FCPA risk and you haven’t retooled for trade and sanctions exposure, you are exposed right now, today.Update your risk assessment. This is not the moment to stand down.The Ethics and Compliance Q and A show is produced by One Stone Creative.