This is a transcript of the podcast Andrew McBride on the FCPA, compliance, and cooperating with government between Julie DiMauro US Content Manager and Andrew McBride, founder and CEO of Integrity Bridge, LLC.
[INTRO]
Julie DiMauro: Greetings everyone, and welcome to a Global Relay Intelligence and Practice, or GRIP, podcast. I am Julie DiMauro, the US Content Manager for GRIP, talking to you from New York City.
GRIP is a service that features a daily website of articles on a variety of compliance and regulatory topics, plus podcasts and other deep dives into compliance trends and best practices. You can find the service at grip.globalrelay.com, and we hope you’ll connect with GRIP on LinkedIn.
I am so pleased to announce that today’s podcast discussion is with Andrew McBride, founder and CEO of Integrity Bridge, LLC. I’m going to ask Andrew to please introduce himself and describe his background before we kick off the program. Over to you, Andrew.
Andrew McBride: Thank you so much, Julie. It’s a pleasure to be on the GRIP Podcast. My name is Andrew McBride. As Julie mentioned, I am now CEO of Integrity Bridge, a risk and compliance consulting practice. I support corporate clients on the design, testing of ethics and compliance programs, and also the selection, configuration, and deployment of technology.
Before that, I was Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Albemarle Corporation, which had a FCPA investigation that culminated in 2023. Before that, I had a similar role at BHP, the World’s Largest Mining Company. My career roots started out as an antitrust lawyer, both in private practice and then at BP.
Julie DiMauro: Thanks so much, Andrew.
I was just joking with Andrew that we have attempted to run this podcast three times. Thanks to the Trump administration keeping us on our toes and some technology challenges, we’re here again. But it was fate, because we have so much to talk about now with everything that the administration and particularly the DOJ has thrown at us.
So, Andrew, before we dive into where the DOJ and SEC currently stand on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I want to discuss with you the allegations of FCPA violations of your previous employer. You were heading up the compliance department at chemical manufacturing company Albemarle, against which FCPA charges were brought by the SEC and DOJ in 2023.
Let’s start with the allegations of the payment of bribes to sales agents and the gaps in internal accounting controls related to those sales agents. There’s a lot of risk in using third parties for any task, especially sales in far-flung regions. What steps did the company take to remediate the compliance program as it related to those third-party sales agents? Other companies might want to consider implementing.
Andrew McBride: Yeah, thanks, Julie. The actual conduct in question dates back to 2010 through to 2017, and it related to activity in our Refining Catalyst business unit. The company took a decision to self-report, which happened in 2080, and the resolution happened in September of 2023.
Part of the credit that we got for the reduction in penalty was to do with the remediation of the issues arising through the use of third-party sales intermediaries. So, firstly, the company decided right at the very board and senior management level to transform the go-to-market strategy.
So all sales agents, not just within our Refining Catalyst business unit, but also within our lithium and bromine business units, they were all terminated. And as you can appreciate that, it’s not a straightforward task to simply terminate your agents. It requires you to put in place your own sales infrastructure within those countries, including high-risk countries’ new legal entities, new supply chain infrastructure, a new sales team to actually undertake the sales, and new relationships being built with customers.
So, I would say it was probably one of the most significant elements of our remediation and certainly helped kind of set the tone of our engagement with the Department of Justice and the SEC. But in addition to that, if you apply the standard hallmarks of an effective compliance program specific to our use of sales intermediaries and distributors and resellers, we co-authored a new global sales policy with the sales function.
We embedded ethics and compliance controls into that sales policy. We enhanced the business justification and due diligence process with distributors and resellers. So, for any distributor or reseller new or being retained, there had to be a very clear business justification to why we needed that rather than being able to sell ourselves. Once it got through that hurdle, we would subject it to a rigorous risk-based due diligence process. We also worked very closely on the underlying systems and controls. So, for example, our sales team were not able to issue quotes to distributors unless all of the appropriate compliance approvals were in place, the trading up to date and the contract was current. And that was through connectivity with our CRM platform and the due diligence platform.
We made improvements to our enquirer cash process to make sure that our quotes lined up with contracts that had been signed up with our sales intermediaries. And we also engaged in enhanced monitoring of those distributors and resellers across a wide variety of dimensions, from reputational monitoring to making sure that distributors were selling within their permitted jurisdictions, to transaction testing, including pricing, to make sure that there were no hidden discounts that were being passed on to, say, end customers in the form of a bribe.
We would subject the retained distributors to a periodic audit and we would deliver training in the same way that we partnered with the sales function on policies and procedures. We did the same with training right down to actually delivering the training jointly with sales leadership to sales employees, which was really core values training for our sales employees, which included the functional requirements to be an effective sales employee, but also the compliance requirements.
Julie DiMauro: There’s a lot to that remediation right there. And there’s a lot that’s been written about it. Albemarle got a lot of attention and continues to do so in terms of being an example of really robust remediation.
I really want to focus, though, on the third-party agent part, because bringing them into the organization as full-time employees – that’s a big deal and a little bit of an unusual step, isn’t it?
Andrew McBride: Yeah, for sure, but it wasn’t the same people. They were actually brand-new employees who had to be very strong technical marketers.
So it’s quite a complicated product, refining catalysts as a certain art, science as to the specifications of those products and how they’re loaded into oil refineries. And so we needed them to be very strong technically, but also to have the commercial prowess to be able to sell the product to the end customers. But what’s really interesting about this is that that go-to-market strategy, that change in that go-to-market strategy, ultimately there was some short-term pain in terms of that transition. And yes, losing some customers in some instances, but actually longer term, it meant that the company had direct contact, direct engagement with it, with those customers. And that led to stronger relationships. And I think as a general observation, it meant that the company was leaner, it was fitter and it was more effectively able to engage with its customers.
Julie DiMauro: That makes a lot of sense. Now, the $98.2m criminal penalty reflected a 45% discount off the bottom of the otherwise applicable US Sentencing Guidelines fine range. That discount was near the top of the potential 50% discount under the DOJ’s evaluation of corporate compliance program policy, a policy specifically embraced by DOJ at the time.
And the discount represented a doubling of the prior discount possible for companies that exhibited full cooperation and effective remediation without self-disclosure. Now, before we talk about the DOJ’s new enforcement policy just released last week, tell us about the significance of the substantial discount and DOJ’s decision to agree to a non-prosecution agreement, NPA, rather than a guilty plea or a deferred prosecution agreement.
Andrew McBride: That $98.2m was part of a broader resolution, which included also a substantial amount of the penalty for disgorgement. So the total amount ultimately paid by our model was $218m.
But to your point, we’ve got a 45% discount against the US sentencing guidelines at the bottom of the US sentencing guidelines.
And so for compliance officers out there looking to kind of incorporate numbers into slide aspects of the boards, what that amounted to was a pretty sizable amount of discount for reflecting the work that we did on our compliance program. We’re talking like millions of dollars of savings. And so, you know, in terms of that discount, as you say, iit’s the highest discount to date on an FCPA-related resolution. I think it was credit to my team and broader functional leads in legal and procurement and sales, all of the hard work that was done by the company to improve our program and our controls. And it was great to see the DOJ get a site as an example of how to achieve the best result and to their policies at the time for self-reporting and cooperation.
They really did use it as a case throughout the later part of 2023 and into 2024 as kind of like efforts to promote companies to go through that self-reporting process and to cooperate.
It was in terms of the distinction between an NPA, guilty plea and a DPA. It was the first time that they had entered into an NPA for FCPA in five years. And the happy consequence of that is why did kind of some of the ancillary or collateral computational consequences of a deferred prosecution agreement in terms of provisions in contracts, whether it be with government or lenders and the like. The fact that it was an NPA was very helpful. But perhaps more importantly, and certainly for me, was that there was no monitor.
So, you know, if you take a look at the album resolution, the NPA or the SEC order, the underlying facts around the right kind of scenarios across multiple countries that were pretty stark is a classic textbook third-party FCPA-type case. But because of our cooperation, the remediation of the root cause, the improvement of the program and then particularly our significant efforts to terminate agents and other third parties, I think that we established that trust with the DOJ in particular such that no monitor was imposed. Now, it’s probably appropriate to say we received 45% discount, not the full 50% discount available at a time. And that was because our self-report was not considered timely.
The investigation internally first started back in September of 2016. It wasn’t officially reported until back in the beginning of 2018. So it took over a year. Now, I can’t actually comment on that because that was before my time. But what I will say is that the conditions of whether to report or not at that point and the guidance issued by the DOJ was a lot less. You were kind of going into a bit more of an unknown situation with a self-report. But then compared to right now, if you look at the revised corporate enforcement policy and the self-report, they give a very detailed description of what happens when you go through a self-report process and when you can be entitled to a declaration. That kind of guidance wasn’t available to Alpha at the time.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. Each iteration got more detailed, which has been very helpful.
Andrew McBride: Yes, exactly.
Julie DiMauro: Now let’s talk about the DOJ’s brand-new corporate enforcement policy. Part of its broader white collar enforcement plan, it does several things, and we’ll go through them. Notable are the 10 high impact areas where the Criminal Division says it will prioritize investigating and prosecuting white -collar crimes and make enhancements to the DOJ’s corporate whistleblower program.
Can you walk us through it, maybe highlighting what you found most worthy of interest, Andrew?
Andrew McBride: Yeah, so every US administration is within their remit to kind of define enforcement policy by reference to the broader kind of presidential direction. And obviously with the America First mandate under the Trump administration, you can see that now played through at a tactical level in, for example, the new criminal enforcement policy.
So the policy prioritizes the areas of interest to President Trump, the national interest crimes, such as cartels, transnational organizations, criminal organizations, the sanctions of Asian customs of Asian procurement fraud, crypto laundering. I mean, it’s very much tied to the broader government’s policy agenda. And yes, I think we’ll get into a bit more detail about the pause on the SCPA enforcement. But it’s … I think it is more, yes, perhaps a deprioritization of relative to other areas, but also I think going to be much more targeted and perhaps more tactical with broader enforcement when it’s linked to things like transnational organized crime or terror finance.
Interesting to see that the whistleblower program has been expanded. It includes tips on trade fraud, immigration violations, terrorism financing and some forfeiture based based awards. You have the continuing focus on self-reporting with a 120-day grace period encouraging companies to come forward with self-disclosure before those whistleblowers act.
I think if you take a step back and think it’s the government, it seems to be focused on really those systemic threats that undermine kind of its broader policy agenda objectives rather than individual kind of compliance slip ups. And what that means is that much more aggressive enforcement, perhaps in more narrowly targeted areas. And so whereas a broader kind of SCPA program might have been OK in years past, it really requires a much more kind of nuanced, willing to go narrower risk assessment process, but broader risk in broader environments. If you think about in – terms of customs, looking at fraud relating to certificates of origin, contacts through the chain supply chain with cartel organizations. And so that need to do that recalibration of your risk assessment and then figuring out whether your generic historic FCPA controls are good enough and they suspect they probably are is going to be really key.
Julie DiMauro: Thank you so much. And they brought up on the FCPA bribery acts that undermine US national security quite specifically. And I thought that emphasis was interesting. They brought up monitors – tailoring the use of such monitors, not saying that they won’t impose monitors, but tailoring the use of them and being judicious with imposing them – and prioritizing the prosecution of senior-level executives. Plus this: Albemarle in April, right, had its 2023 NPA terminated. Is that right?
Andrew McBride: Yes, thank you for the call out. So I had left it a year ago, but credit to the team. They as standard with a DPA or an NPA, there is a three-year post resolution reporting phase, which after which there is a CCO, CFO and a CEO certification.
And I was pleased to see that Albemarle was able to secure an early termination of that three-year reporting phase courtesy of the excellent work done by the compliance team.
Julie DiMauro: I also thought it was interesting, too, that they mentioned the voluntary self-reporting element, the near miss. So I don’t know where Albemarle would fall in this. They can’t be completely specific and bring up prior cases, but they did mention that self-disclosure made in good faith, right, but that doesn’t meet the definition strictly of voluntary self-disclosure. In those situations, you shall get an NPA if you fully cooperated and truly remediated. The word shall was the new word there, not “can get an NPA.”
Andrew McBride: Yes. You could almost kind of cite it back to kind of like that unique situation of the Albemarle case. So, you know, they were very careful with their signal and even for that adjustment in the signaling last year about how they yes, we got a reduction in our penalty of 5% because it wasn’t timely.
But they they didn’t want to kind of see that as a deterrent for people to come forth to self-report. And so I think that that’s where you’ll see that language around good faith for sure.
Julie DiMauro: Terrific. Let’s jump back to the FCPA as it stands right now. President Trump’s February 10th executive order directed the Department of Justice to pause enforcement of the FCPA for at least 180 days. It came just a short while after his attorney general, Pam Bondi issued memoranda that in part signaled not a positive enforcement of the law, but a refocus of it toward organized crime and terrorist network groups, which you have mentioned like gangs and large drug traffickers.
What’s your best interpretation of where we stand right now, especially since the DOJ has chosen to keep pursuing certain pending cases in the FCPA arena and chosen not to pursue others. How should companies navigate the uncertainty here?
Andrew McBride: It’s interesting that the Bondi memo is almost kind of like a precursor to kind of the revised corporate enforcement policy where it could have like set out its area of prosecutorial discretion. And so I mean, technically, the FCPA pause is still there while they undergo review and a reflection on what they’re going to do and what that would mean in terms of this enforcement and then the guidance is issued.
For example, will the DOJ and the SEC update the FCPA resources guide? But I think the last version of that dates back to 2020. That’s just one example. And then to your point also, what’s the strategy for individual continuation of individual prosecutions or new prosecutions? I think it’s still early days and we’ll have to kind of wait and see. I mean, I think it really is tying that the corruption risk back to the Trump administration’s policy agenda. The focus on trans criminal organizations, the cartels, the state-backed networks. And so I’d also kind of like instances of bribery corruption where US companies are out in the broader global economy are being adversely affected, saying kind of bidding rounds, bidding competitions because there is some bribery being undertaken.
And so I think that message of targeted enforcement will happen. And then for a corruption risk and enforcement risk has not vanished. And so you see foreign prosecutors like the UK SFO step in and recently announced the collaboration with the French equivalent and the Swiss equivalent. You’ve got even at the state level questions about whether the FCPA could enforce at the state by, if you look at California, it made the announcement that it was exploring, enforcing the FCPA through its unfair competition law.
And then, yes, obviously, at some point in the future under a different US administration, the enforcement of the FCPA could snap back to what we have been accustomed to over the past 10 to 15 years. And so what is this kind of like all being for finance professionals? I think goes back to what I was saying earlier of we just need to be smarter, more focused on risk assessment and more nuanced.
So again, if I think about kind of like the exposure to cartels, it requires bringing in different people within your organization to assess our exposure to kind of cartel activity. Two examples of that, your logistics function, like understanding kind of like the logistics infrastructure within a particular country, whether it be Mexico or other countries in Latin America or beyond. What are the trade routes that you go and then overlay that with kind of like the where the cartels are operating that may require bringing in if you’ve got a global security team or relying on outside experts that focus on security matters.
We’ve got their fingers on the pulse. It raises health and safety issues about how you’re engaging with logistics companies or your other third parties in those countries where you’re starting to kind of tighten the screws and then, you know, are there some health and safety issues about doing that because there’s a third reaction of local cartel members. And then even on the human rights side, so maybe compliance or it may be your sustainability team are undertaking local human rights impact assessments at company operations or in the extended supply chain. And they may be uncovering kind of exposure to cartel activity or gang-related activity.
And it’s really important that there is that escalation process from your human rights work up into your broader kind of compliance risk assessment so that it can be responded to in the appropriate way. I would kind of fall back to what’s super interesting to me is the rise, the fall and the rise again of just broad risk management, old-school basic fraud risk management. You see in enforcement in the US of the False Claims Act, again, it’s policy-driven to use the FCPA to enforce customs evasion. You see in the United Kingdom the introduction of the failure to prevent fraud offense. And what that requires then is that broader fraud risk assessment, not bribery specific, much broader. It requires you to go much deeper into functional activities like trade, sustainability reporting, sales related communications to understand what opportunities that are for fraud. What are the existing controls? What’s the gap assessment and what’s the remediation?
Julie DiMauro: From everything you said, it sounds like it’s not a time to stop investing in compliance.
Andrew McBride: I agree. It’s just that it’s about being smarter with your investment of your resources and being at the table. But there are some I think that when the FCPA pause was announced, there was a lot of compliance professionals kind of stiff.
They’re always having this existential crisis about what’s our role. And actually, I think now is the time for compliance professionals to be stepping up because there are some huge kind of transformational geopolitical shifts going on, which are having some very significant impacts on company strategy, including things like supply chain, onshore, offshoring. And all of that comes with risk writ large and specific compliance risk. And so having compliance risk and compliance at the table proactively supporting those company deliberations, that is going to transform and enhance the perception of compliance rather than kind of a government announcement on a temporary pause of FCPA enforcement.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. I love the fact that you’ve been mentioning, that given the new emphasis and prioritization as they’ve spelled it out, it does put more of an emphasis on compliance to work with different departments, offer different trainings, have different discussions and engage in a different way, perhaps with business partners to meet those priorities and expectations. And to be able to be able to make that shift in paradigm and priorities. And I think that, you know, you can’t take for granted some old playbook – it does need to be more of a dynamic one, given these shifts.
Andrew McBride: The playbook, the way in which you approach your risk assessment, your compliance program design, it is an opportunity to take a fresh look at it and to take a step back and just think holistically about all of the drivers that are and stakeholders that are interested in the effectiveness of your program, not just FCPA or bribery compliance, but across all elements of compliance programs.
And so being able to kind of go deep on risk assessment and focus your efforts on particular risks that have got heightened risk of enforcement and that need the additional controls and do that, that investment. And then once you figured it out, make it as efficient, as effective and as service-orientated as possible, and then move on to the next one and making sure that you’ve got the evidence of your program working so that it’s a prosecutor or a regulator at some point does come knocking. Or if you’re having to address that in public reporting, you’ve got that evidence to back it up.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. It might be a good time to recalibrate the way that you do surveillance. And I’m not just saying this because you’re on, but to employ independent expert advisory resources to do a proper risk assessment that reflects new priorities from this administration. It might be something to consider.
OK, so I want to talk to you about Integrity Bridge. I read two articles that your firm just produced. One was on compliance program effectiveness and another on possible AI use cases in ethics and compliance programs. Can you tell us more about each of them and please tease out maybe a few points from each?
Andrew McBride: Yeah, sure. So there are three kind of stated purposes of Integrity Bridge, and one support clients with improving their ethics compliance programs. The second was to support compliance tech, improving their compliance tech. The third was about supporting the broader ethics compliance program through the re-mentoring and knowledge sharing.
And I’d always intended that as part of the Integrity Bridge positioning that we would issue long-form articles that go deep into particular issues that would help kind of drive the narrative, drive the discussion forward. And I was pleased to issue the first one about a month ago, which was on compliance program effectiveness. And it was really about what I was saying earlier that there are now so many stakeholders interested in program effectiveness, not just prosecutors, regulators, shareholders, ratings agencies, the broader NGOs, the public more broadly. But the focus, as we’ve been discussing on this podcast, it’s not just about FCPA risk.
There are all kinds of risks that need to be managed in an appropriate, robust way. So now is the time to take that step back and think, well, how can we take a fresh approach, which is a tech-enabled, data-driven approach to program assurance? And in the article, I talk about how you’d be very clear against kind of what standards, both from a design, management, empowerment and execution, what standards are you assessing each of your individual program or program elements against?
And then having that documented so you have your standards driven from guidance and enforcement behaviors practice to then actually documenting your self-assessment. And then, yes, sometimes you might want to have that independently reviewed. But then secondly, having an intentional approach to the maintenance of evidence to support how you are complying with those standards. So whether that be documentation right down to policies, examples of how you’ve gone out to consultation on policies, the right metrics, making sure you’ve got the right support to metadata.
I go into a lot of detail about the types of supporting evidence, that there should be some way of catching that in a systematized and clear and consistent way. And one of the advantages of bringing all that together now is generative AI. So being able to wrap an AI interface, a query tool around those materials means that you’re then able to interrogate that for trends. You’re able to support your reporting at multiple levels, both the public to the board to senior management and then within your own team.
And so I think we’re only just scratching the surface of how that act of bringing together your standards, your documented self-assessment against standards and the supporting evidence. I think that creates some real efficiency then on how you respond to third party questionnaires from customers or from other interested stakeholders and how you do the reporting. And then in the second article, I build on the point even more.
I’ve been facilitating a number of workshops and conferences over the past few months, really exploring kind of like how companies, compliance teams are utilizing the new enterprise, tools that their companies have given them access to, whether it be Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. What’s really interesting is that companies are investing heavily into these enterprise AI tools and use cases. But it’s the likes of sales and supply chain that are getting most of the attention because that’s obviously driving the business. And yet the functions like compliance, they’ve got access to them and they’re being told by management to use them to make their processes more efficient and more effective. But they’re not getting the same level of support in developing them.
And so the article was really just my effort to help its compliance teams understand the possible use cases for this technology, to also kind of highlight where there are some third-party providers out there that can do some of the more advanced work. And then hopefully incentivize them to work either internally or with companies like Integrity Bridge to develop those low-hanging fruit AI use cases that can support their program. If you’re interested, you can go to Integrity Bridge and go to the resources section. You’ll see a whole bunch of materials there. You can also follow me on LinkedIn, and you’ll see my recent post.
Julie DiMauro: Perfect. Thank you so much. I want to talk to you about your career trajectory, Andrew. You worked at BP before Albemarle, and I want to have you tell us how your career trajectory has informed your consulting work as you perform it now. And maybe what advice you might have for junior compliance officers that are trying to climb the rung in this environment.
Andrew McBride: Yeah, I mean, it’s been an absolute privilege to have a career in compliance. It’s allowed me to be able to work around the world in different work environments. My wife and I have three boys born in a different country. The courtesy of the compliance path that I’ve taken has been just such a privilege. And if I reflect back on that, I mean, it’s really about taking advantage of opportunities that are presented to you that will stretch you, that will take you outside of your comfort zone.
And so for me, the very first time professionally that happened was I was an EU competition lawyer in London working for BP. And I had the opportunity to move to Chicago to do US antitrust support as part of the US legal department within BP. And that really gave me the confidence of pushing on, kicking on to new areas. And so after I left BP, I moved to BHP and I headed up the global antitrust practice. And so again, that was kind of assuming now global responsibility and also management responsibility of a team at a time when BHP was doing a lot of merger M&A work that was triggering a lot of antitrust and foreign investment scrutiny.
And then within BHP, I started to kind of expand my interest and responsibilities into other areas like state secrets, market regulatory from a trading point of view, and then laterally sanctions and an FCPA. I was the acting chief appliance officer at the BHP at the back end of BHP’s own FCPA investigation relating to entertaining at the Beijing Olympics. And what was really interesting through that journey, which extended to Albemarle, is that when you go through, when you kind of expand in your remit to other areas of compliance, you realize that there is so much more that unites those different areas of compliance than divides or separates.
And every time that you expand out into another area of compliance, you become a bit more effective at how you go about doing that, how you get to grips with that new area of compliance. And you effectively deploy your own playbook for how you wrap your standard approach to your compliance program design and testing to that. So you get that more and more confidence of stepping outside of your comfort zone to the point where I kind of would relish kind of a new era compliance. For example, laterally at Albemarle, it was about human rights. I had that responsibility and that was a real challenge to kind of understand all the various permutations of that.
But then it also it does. So there were opportunities that were presented to me and then I was also, I was open to them. But sometimes it does take a bit of intentionality. So when I left BHP in Australia, my wife and I decided to make the move back to the United States. My wife’s American. I was going through the green card process.
And as much as it would have been nice just kicking back in San Diego and spending all the time on the beach, I felt it was appropriate for me in addition to my English and Australian legal qualifications, getting kind of to California and taking the California State Bar, which was a real experience as well as becoming a certified fraud examiner. And so I didn’t have to do that. But what that meant was that when I got my green card and I was applying for roles, it served to kind of level me up with kind of other US compliance officers. And they also give me an edge because I had that international experience and qualification.
And then within your business, that’s on the professional, the personal kind of skill side experience side. But then within the business, like just knowing the business, like absolutely cold, right? Getting a real good commercial fluency, talking the language of business, understanding strategy, pouring over companies’ 10-Ks if they’re publicly reported, reading the sustainability report, participating in meetings, speaking with senior leaders. You know, that gives you that trust and as a trusted advisor that I think really helps you succeed in your career and that ability to speak plainly. Right.
So when you’re distilling sometimes very complex risks into simple, straightforward terms, whether that be in a policy or procedure in your account, day-to-day counseling or in meetings is super important. And then finally, I think that the ethics and compliance community is one of the most supportive out there. So find mentors.
I mean, just find people that you see on LinkedIn that are posting publicly and whose messaging resonates and reach out to them. And I’m pretty sure that they would be honored to be able to support your career development. It’s something that I’ve done for years. I spend part of my Friday afternoons every week spending time with junior compliance professionals to support them through their career progression. And it’s something which obviously I think they benefit from it, but I benefit from as well. I learned from them because at the end of the day, by doing that, we all rise together.
Julie DiMauro: I’m so glad you brought that up because let’s say there are, you know, 15 million compliance professors, professionals out there and maybe even just in the United States. But sometimes it feels like 50, because it’s a kind of cozy grouping of people that share a lot of best practices with each other, engage in a lot of idea sharing, resource sharing, mentoring, like you said, either formally or informally. And if you avail yourself of these opportunities through networking events and certifications, it can really, really help your career out.
Andrew McBride: For sure.
Julie DiMauro: That’s terrific. And I wait for your memoir. I’ll deal with the articles for now because they’re wonderful and hugely practical. I invite everybody to read them because they’re incredibly, incredibly useful. But later on, we’ll get your full memoir. How about that?
Andrew McBride: I’m not sure. We’ll see. We’ll see. A lot of chapters to write, hopefully.
Julie DiMauro: There’d be a lot to write. Andrew McBride, thank you so much for being on the program today.
Andrew McBride: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.
Julie DiMauro: I thank our listeners today, as ever, for joining us for this GRIP podcast. You can find our articles and podcasts at grip.globalrelay.com. And we look forward to seeing you at the next session. Have a great day.