Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about conflicts of interest.

My guest is Stephanie Davis, and she's the chief ethics and compliance officer for Volkswagen Group of America.

Thank you for joining me, Stephanie.

Thank you so much for having me, Alexandra. Why don't we start with a fairly remedial question? When we talk about

conflicts of interest in a corporate setting, what is the core of our concern? Is it self-dealing,

just a perception of bias? What is it that we are addressing?

So I think it's important to think about this in a holistic sense. So conflicts of interest,

we're looking for transparency. We're looking for self-dealing, unfair advantages. Are we making

our decisions democratically? The real core of this is unfair bias. And so what we try to get at that as an employee, we have a duty to the company.

And sometimes if we have personal conflicts, we may actually not do our duty to the company because we are personally conflicted.

For example, if your mother starts working, I work for a car company, right?

So if your mother starts working at a dealership, is there an argument that you would make sure that

dealership gets all the best cars? And so we can, in our case, if something like that happens,

if you disclose that to me,

I can figure out a way to wall you off from that process so that you can still do your job

and your mother can still do her job as long as it's in the light.

And that's one of the things that we really emphasize at Volkswagen Group of America is

conflicts of interest are an opportunity.

And as long as we know about them, we can fix them. And hopefully no one has to lose their job.

In extreme cases, maybe we have to move people inside the company around. For example, if you

fall in love with your cubicle mate and you work on the same team and you end up

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