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The Justice Department announced its largest bust under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ever on January 20th, arresting 22 people on charges of trying to pay bribes to a foreign official to secure contracts for weapons sales. The foreign official in this case was actually an undercover FBI agent. This signals a new commitment by the Justice Department to conduct large FCPA investigations (this case alone stretched from Las Vegas to London and involved 150 or more investigative agents) with sophisticated tools and strategies.

Stewart Baker former Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS under George W. Bush makes some excellent points in his Dec. 29th 2009 blog Skating on Stilts Are You A Privacy Victim? Part 7. Please read on...and think about what he has to say.

To be sure, public trust is declining, not only within companies, but across many of our institutions—government, the news and other media, nonprofits, the major professions and educational institutions—but the focus of our concern here is the eroding trust of employees in their own companies and their leadership.

A Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) subsidiary's widely reported problems with a whistle blower and federal government contracts should serve as a cautionary tale for all businesses now subject to the FAR/DFAR mandatory disclosure requirements.

The unwillingness of employees to report misconduct or volunteer their good ideas for helping their companies to improve products and services lies in their lack of trust that good will come from speaking up. Their mistrust, as Detert and Edmonson found, may be a result of their own personal experience, their knowledge of the negative consequences suffered by others who spoke up, or a culture of collective myths, which may be rooted in fact or only in their fears.

This week at the National Contract Managers Association's (NCMA) Annual Congress in Long Beach, California, I heard a number of concerns from those nervous about the FAR/DFAR's new ethics and mandatory disclosure requirements for government contractors. But, I also heard many strong indications from government contracting officers that they view this new basis for suspension and debarment as being both welcome and long overdue.

In our first blog (January 1, 2008), we asked, Why do employees continue to remain silent in the face of corporate ethical lapses? We cited data from the Ethics Resource Center’s 2007 National Business Ethics Survey which found that more than half (56%) of employees witnessed what they believed to be serious misconduct in the previous twelve months, and nearly half of them (42%) refused to report that misconduct to anyone.

Last week, insurance industry regulators agreed to take an exceptionally strong position on managing environmental risk issues driven by climate change.