Welcome to the award-winning FCPA Compliance Report, the longest-running podcast in compliance. In this episode, we replay a recent webinar Tom Fox participated in, hosted by EQS. The panel moderator was Steph Holmes, and the panelists were Tom Fox, Mary Shirley, and Matt Kelly.

The session focuses on six key 2026 trends for ethics and compliance programs:

(1) AI moving from experimentation to operational use, emphasizing deliberate scaling, human-in-the-loop oversight, governance frameworks, monitoring, and managing “shadow AI,” with practical use cases such as policy chatbots, gift/travel/entertainment reviews, and AI-enabled third-party risk lifecycle management;

(2) enforcement “volatility” and unpredictable regulatory signals, with emphasis on returning to fundamentals such as documenting program inputs and outcomes, and noting continued activity, including record FCA resolutions and a DOJ whistleblower program award leading to a rapid antitrust settlement;

(3) shifting employer–employee dynamics, including Gartner survey findings that 40% of employees would intentionally miss a compliance requirement to harm their organization, discussion of trust, employee sentiment, multi-generational communication differences, and the need to partner with HR while staying within organizational lanes;

(4) heightened third-party and supply chain risk expectations, including cybersecurity, tariffs/tariff evasion, export controls, and the need to unify siloed risk views into a holistic third-party risk assessment;

(5) anticipated increases in whistleblowing and investigation demands amid volatility, highlighting the importance of preventing retaliation, keeping reporters feeling heard through responsive communications, triage protocols, and anonymized case examples to build trust; and

(6) measuring program effectiveness through a shift from outputs to outcomes, including reviewing KPIs and key risk indicators, peer review of investigations, hotline “mystery shopping,” and gap analyses against the DOJ’s ECCP and compliance program hallmarks, with special emphasis on third-party documentation and ongoing monitoring.

Resources:

Mary Shirley on LinkedIn

Steph Holmes on LinkedIn

Matt Kelly at Radical Compliance

EQS

Tom Fox

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