Corruption Crime & Compliance

Hosted by Michael Volkov

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Episodes

481

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Michael Volkov tackles the current and hot topics in the legal realms of corruption, crime, and compliance.

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60 recent

September 3, 20261 min

When You Fail to Fix an Already Flagged Compliance Gap

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.

September 1, 20268 min

Episode 446 -- L3Harris's CEO Ouster and the Board Governance Lesson Nobody Learns the First Time

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.

September 1, 20261 min

Could Your Routine Customs Payment Actually Be a Bribe?

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.

August 30, 20269 min

Episode 445 -- Why Your Organization Needs an AI Acceptable Use Policy

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.

August 27, 20261 min

Can Your Biggest FCPA Risk Be a Trusted Insider?

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.

August 25, 20261 min

Is Trade Fraud the Next Major False Claims Act Risk?

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.

August 23, 20268 min

Episode 444 -- BAE Systems' $36 Million ITAR Wake-Up Call

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.

August 20, 20261 min

Where Is DOJ Taking False Claims Act Enforcement Next?

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.

August 19, 20268 min

Episode 443 -- Nothing Crosses the Border for Free

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.

August 18, 20261 min

Could AI Use Waive Privilege in Your Internal Investigation?

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.