Is your organization designed to hear the truth—or to explain it away?
Corporations have Enterprise Risk Management, established Ethics & Compliance Programs, Internal & External audits, risk assessments, multiple risk and compliance heat maps and dashboards, and boards charged with oversight.
So why do major corporate scandals keep happening?
What if the problem isn’t a lack of controls but the organizational structures that prevent those controls from making a difference?
In this episode of Great Women in Compliance, we speak with Astrid Yee-Sobraques, Risk Sherpa and author of The Structural Capture of Corporate Conscience, about the uncomfortable relationship between ethics, commercial pressure, corporate governance, and power.
We explored whether the Ethics & Compliance functions can identify risks but cannot meaningfully influence how the risk will be mitigated, and whether the Ethics & Compliance Program is effective—or simply a system for documenting concerns.
We asked:
- Can a company with ethical people still be structurally designed to produce unethical outcomes?
- When does legitimate business risk acceptance become a way to rationalize unacceptable conduct?
- If Ethics & Compliance can identify the risk but cannot change the outcome, is that independence—or an illusion of it?
- How can boards uncover the risks that management’s reporting and assumptions may obscure?
For Ethics & Compliance professionals, the discussion raises difficult questions about independence, professional responsibility, escalation, and the pressure to protect revenue-producing relationships.
For directors and board members, it challenges the assumption that more reporting and better dashboards do not necessarily translate into better oversight and decisions.