Ethicast

What happens when a company becomes the target of a congressional investigation, and how can ethics, compliance, legal, and government affairs teams prepare before scrutiny arrives?

In this episode of The Ethicast, host Bill Coffin speaks with Kimberly Hamm and Carlos Felipe Uriarte, partners at Morrison Foerster and co-chairs of the firm’s Congressional Investigations practice. Drawing on deep experience across Congress, the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and high-stakes corporate investigations, Kim and Carlos explain what organizations should understand about congressional scrutiny, how investigations unfold, and why preparation across internal teams matters.

The conversation explores what a congressional investigation really entails, whether companies should expect executive testimony, the emerging issues most likely to attract attention, and how congressional inquiries can intersect with other government investigations or enforcement actions. Kim and Carlos also discuss how ethics and compliance, legal, and government affairs teams can work together before a crisis hits, and whether there is such a thing as “winning” before Congress.

Topics include:

For more insights from Kim Hamm and Carlos Felipe Uriarte, visit their profile pages at mofo.com and Morrison Foerster’s Congressional Investigations page, including their Congressional Investigations Quarterly client alert.

For additional free resources on ethics, compliance, and corporate integrity, visit the Ethisphere Resource Center at ethisphere.com/resources.

Prediction markets promise a sharper read on the future. But recent stories raise a darker question: what happens when traders are not predicting events, but exploiting confidential information or manipulating the inputs that settle the bet? In this episode, Erica and Bill examine alleged classified-information betting tied to a Venezuela military operation, suspected weather-sensor tampering in Paris, and a college football gambling scandal to unpack the ethics and compliance risks now surrounding prediction markets, from insider information and fraud to oversight, trust, and institutional integrity.

For those who are not aware, prediction markets work like a hybrid between investment markets and prop betting. "Investors" buy shares in the yes-or-no or A-or-B outcome of a projected uncertainty: Will Finland or Greece win the 2026 Eurovision contest? Will the Fed change interest rates in June? Will traffic in the Strait of Hormuz return to normal by May 15? Will Tottenham Hotspur be relegated at the end of the 2025-2026 English Premier League? And so on.

Prediction markets have been around for a while, but they have exploded in betting volume in recent years. And on a more troubling note, they increasingly appear to provide an avenue for the improper use of inside information as well as a vector for fraud, cheating, and other undesireable outcomes.

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Ethics and compliance champions programs can extend the reach of a centralized E&C team, but how do you prove they are working? In this BELA Asks episode of Ethicast, Ethisphere’s Erica Salmon Byrne explains how organizations can evaluate both the overall ROI of an ambassador or champions program and the performance of individual ambassadors.

Erica discusses practical data points to track, including employee questions, policy confusion, participation in ambassador conversations, use of program materials, and employee awareness of local champions. She also explains why a strong champions program creates a valuable feedback loop between employees and the ethics and compliance team, helping organizations respond faster, improve communications, and strengthen risk mitigation.

Learn more about BELA: www.ethisphere.com/bela

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future-state issue for ethics and compliance teams. It is already reshaping how programs manage training, reporting, risk assessment, monitoring, measurement, and operational decision-making.

In this episode of The Ethicast, host Bill Coffin speaks with Roxanne Petraeus, Co-Founder and CEO of Ethena, and Dianne Ramos, Head of Ethics at Guardian Life Insurance, about how ethics and compliance leaders can move AI from experimentation into practical, responsible use.

Roxanne and Dianne recently led the “Prompt to Practice: A Hands-On Workshop for the AI-Curious CCO” breakout session at the 2026 Global Ethics Summit, and they bring a practical, field-tested perspective to one of the most urgent questions facing today’s chief ethics and compliance officers: how can E&C teams adopt AI quickly, responsibly, and in ways that actually improve program performance?

This conversation covers how to build AI fluency, create safe space for experimentation, engage leadership and key stakeholders, measure ROI, and lead teams through the cultural change that AI adoption requires.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

To learn more about Ethena’s AI-driven compliance tools, visit goethena.com.

To learn more about Guardian Life, visit guardianlife.com.

To learn more about Ethisphere’s research on AI in ethics and compliance, visit ethisphere.com and download AI in Ethics & Compliance: Risk to Manage, Tool to Leverage.

Subscribe to The Ethicast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify for more conversations on ethics, compliance, corporate integrity, and the future of business leadership.

At Ethisphere, we believe there is no competition in compliance. That’s why we’re using this show as a platform to answer high-level questions about business integrity that have been posed to us by the members of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, or BELA.

BELA is a global ethics & compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking, events, and other resources to advance your E&C program. It also provides a concierge service by which members can submit questions around best practices, and our internal experts will provide an answer, plus helpful resources with more information.

Many of these questions are particular to a specific company’s needs. But many more of them speak to challenges or opportunities facing E&C professionals everywhere. So in this episode, we’re going to answer one such question as part of our ongoing mission to make the world a better place by advancing business integrity.

Joining us once again to answer your questions is BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne. In this episode, Erica answers the following question: How can I build the business case for an embedded and dedicated communications specialist within our E&C department?

To learn more about BELA, visit https://www.ethisphere.com/bela to request guest access to the Member Resource Hub and to speak with a BELA Engagement Director.

Erica Salmon Byrne, Executive Chair of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, answers another question from the BELA Membership around how to date investigations case volume data. In particular, should case volume be dates when investigations are opened or closed?

To learn more about joining the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, visit https://www.ethisphere.com/bela to request guest access to the Member Resource Hub and to speak with a BELA Engagement Director.

In the highly regulated world of financial services, running a top-notch ethics and compliance program is table stakes for maintaining one's ability to do business at all. But Principal Financial Group recognizes that this goes deeper than merely abiding by regulatory expectation. By maintaining high ethical standards and reinforcing the understanding of (and adherence to) its Global Code of Conduct, related policies, and legal and regulatory requirements across the organization by delivering education, training, and conducting risk assessments, Principal has earned the coveted Compliance Leader Verification designation through 2026 from Ethisphere.

In this episode, Noreen Fierro, Senior Vice President, & Enterprise Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer of Principal explains how the company maintains its best-in-class ethics and compliance program by keeping culture at the center of it.

BELA Chair Erica Salmon Byrne tackles an interesting question from the members of the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance around how to handle the risks that arise when employees relocate temporarily to an international location - either for professional or private reasons - but must maintain their connectivity to their virtual workplace.

To learn more about joining the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, visit https://www.ethisphere.com/bela to request guest access to the Member Resource Hub and to speak with a BELA Engagement Director.

The Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA) is a global ethics & compliance community that provides exclusive access to helpful data, benchmarking, events, and other resources to advance your E&C program.
 
Each year, BELA honors select member companies and individual ethics and compliance leaders for their extraordinary commitment to advancing community engagement, growth, and transformation. These are the BELA Impact Awards, and they reflect BELA’s own dedication to moving the integrity agenda forward for all companies.
 
In particular, the BELA Community Champion award recognizes outstanding contributions to the member community by way of content resources, event participation, publications, mentorship, or peer-to-peer support.
 
This year, BELA recognizes American defense, aviation, information technology, health services, and medical research company Leidos—which has also been a World's Most Ethical Companies honoree since 2018—as one of its BELA Community Champions.
 
With us today to discuss how Leidos earned this award—and how the organization exemplifies the credo that there is no competition in compliance—is Jelahn Stewart, Chief Compliance Officer, Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Leidos, where she oversees the organization’s global ethics, compliance, and business integrity functions. 

People managers are the front line for delivering to employees the expectations (and aspirations) of not just the ethics and compliance team, but that of senior management and even the Board. And yet, managers often struggle with these burdens because they just don’t receive the right support...which creates otherwise preventable friction and risk within the organization.

In this episode, Ethisphere’s Eric Jorgenson, Director, Data & Services, and Katie Kruger, Senior Culture Analyst, will discuss how organizations can improve their manager communications on topics involving ethics and compliance.

Learn more at the Ethisphere Resource Center: https://www.ethisphere.com/resources