Executive edge: Steve Foster; Ex-cop leads business ethics enforcement.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: Steve Foster - Business Controls Inc. - Biography

A collectable framed photo and signature of notorious FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover hangs prominently over the desk of Steve Foster, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Business Controls Inc. in Littleton.

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"It's there as a symbol of how not to do business," said Foster, a former Aurora police officer with more than 20 years in law enforcement who now helps companies implement ethics programs, conduct ethical workplace investigations and prevent workplace fraud and violence. "Hoover symbolized secrecy and unethical behavior but I believe businesses today need to be transparent in everything they do."

Foster, the former president of the Colorado Drug-Free Workplace Alliance and Colorado DARE, left the Aurora Police Department shortly after Denver police officer Bruce L. Vander Jagt's death in a shooting in 1997.

"I was frustrated with the way things were handled--his wife was a DARE teacher in Colorado--so I took a year's leave of absence to learn everything I could about technology and understand business," Foster said.

He emerged wanting to use his law-enforcement background and sense of business ethics to help the corporate world deal with issues such as employee and identity theft, workplace fraud and violence.

"Being a police officer is a hard job--you never stopped looking to solve something yet you only had time to patch up a situation and move on," said Foster. "But now I get to lead people and teach people yet I still get to solve crime on the business level."

When Hewlett-Packard's scandal of corporate spying and boardroom leaks broke earlier this year...