What if anthropologist David Graeber wrote his bestseller “Bullshit Jobs,” with its chapter on a compliance professional, today? Severin Wirz explores how AI and soft skills are helping compliance professionals get a second chance at Graeber’s old assessment.
Almost a decade ago, the anthropologist David Graeber coined the purposefully provocative term “Bullshit Jobs” to describe a new phenomenon he’d observed: countless employees describing their own stultifying work as essentially pointless. That observation resulted in a bestselling book by the same name that came replete with examples of corporate cogs lamenting the utter uselessness of their employment: the receptionist whose sole purpose was to answer a couple of phone calls each day and make sure that the candy bowl was always full; the manager who compiled stacks of information into reports that no one read; the IT subcontractor who moved computer monitors from one cubicle to the next only to then fill out endless paperwork documenting what he’d just done.
And then, in Chapter Two, Graeber introduces “Layla” who works “in a growing industry born out of the federal regulation the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” and whose job it is to create due diligence reports that, in her own words, are 80% bullshit: “Unless someone has been criminally charged, I have no way of knowing from my apartment in Brooklyn if they’ve been handed an envelope full of cash in Guangzhou,” Layla admits in Graeber’s book.
That Graeber highlights compliance as an industry ripe for bullshit may come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t. After all, for years the compliance industry itself has warned of the risk of compliance turning into a box-ticking exercise — a function that exists primarily to allow companies to mount a reasonable defense should something go wrong, regardless of the actual efficacy in preventing the wrongdoing from happening in the first place.
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Read moreDetailsMuch of this is a problem of its own making. Compliance as a profession is notoriously sclerotic. Once a company puts a control in place — be it a certification, an annual training, an intake form, a due diligence process or otherwise — that control usually remains in place irrespective of changes in the regulatory landscape or in the company’s own behavior. Compliance officers are especially susceptible to peer pressure and regulatory expectations and often find it is easier to add new controls than remove existing ones. Over time, these controls become a thick morass of bureaucracy, and those on lower rungs of the corporate ladder left responsible for implementing them cannot help but see the falseness and purposelessness at the core of their work.
The antidote is to view compliance as an iterative, not additive, exercise. Much like Marie Kondo throwing out an old sweater, there is a certain joy that comes with discarding a control that no longer serves its purpose. Once compliance officers learn to let go of their fear of not doing enough, they will find that compliance can instead be a bastion of creativity and innovation.
In fact, perhaps more than ever, compliance officers today have both the leeway and capabilities to experiment in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Graeber’s book came out in 2018, several years before AI took over the corporate landscape. Today, he’d observe that tech-savvy compliance officers are not only automating the bullshit out of their jobs but using AI to break down silos, monitor more behavior and dream up entirely new ways of identifying misconduct. He’d also see that many of those younger employees who were most prone to fall prey to bullshit jobs in the past are now best positioned to design, build and deploy advanced AI systems that create actual value in compliance rather than performative box-ticking.
Of course, AI is just one way to break free of the constraints of a calcified compliance program. Some have focused on the soft skills necessary for engaging in real dialogue with leadership to build a compliance culture. Others have looked to the rigor of statistics and the social sciences to measure compliance efficacy.
What matters, of course, is the destination, not the path taken to get there. And compliance programs that work well aren’t afraid to try various routes to get to the right outcome. What they share in common, however, is a disdain for the stench of form over function — in other words, bullshit.
Severin Wirz is an attorney specializing in US and international anticorruption law. He currently serves as director of ethics and compliance at Applied Materials, a semiconductor equipment manufacturer based in Silicon Valley. Previously, he was senior director of anti-corruption compliance at TIAA, where he led global anti-bribery efforts across the financial services enterprise. Severin is a frequent contributor to the field, with published articles on anticorruption compliance and editorial roles in key reference works, and his book “Bribery Beyond Borders: The Story of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” was published by CCI Press in 2025. 
