Richard J. Bednar

Formerly an Army JAG Brigadier General and Army Debarring Official, and more recently Senior Counsel with Crowell & Moring, Washington, DC, Dick is nationally recognized as an expert in government contracts ethics & compliance issues and suspension and debarment matters. Concurrently for the last ten years, he has served as the Executive Director (“Coordinator”) of the Defense Industry Initiative on Business Ethics and Conduct (“DII”), consisting of over 85 leading defense companies. Additionally, Dick continues to serve as Executive Director for a construction industry group and an organization of healthcare group purchasing organizations, each exclusively dedicated to ethics and compliance.

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations is widely regarded as establishing the “Gold Standard” for compliance programs designed to prevent and detect criminal violations within a business organization. Dick served as a full member of the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee which produced the report resulting in the November 2005 revisions to the Guidelines, strengthening the elements of what is regarded as an effective compliance program. He has applied this experience in helping many Government contractors build or strengthen compliance programs and compliance training. He also has served as a compliance monitor for companies required to have such external function. Dick also was the Editor-in-Chief and contributing author to the ABA publication “The Practitioner’s Guide to Suspension and Debarment.” He has personally counseled and directly assisted scores of companies on ethics and government contracts compliance matters.

Dick is a popular speaker and panelist on government contracts ethics and compliance matters.

For three years Dick was the director of the Government Contracts Program at George Washington University Law School. Currently, in addition to his other activities, he is a director of the Procurement Roundtable, Washington, D.C.