For most of the last decade, ethics and compliance justified its budget with the potential fines that it helped avoid. That case no longer holds. 92% of S&P 500 market value is intangible. Protecting that value is the new job of ethics and compliance.
In this article:
Why Is 92% of Market Value Intangible?
In 1975, intangible assets made up only 17% of the S&P 500’s market value. By 2005, that figure had risen to 79%. As of Ocean Tomo’s most recent count, it is 92%. Brand, intellectual property, culture, and the trust of employees and third parties make up most of that value. Much of it never appears on a balance sheet an auditor can sign off on.
Ocean Tomo has tracked the S&P 500, but boards everywhere hold the same kind of exposure. A board in Brussels carries the same exposure as one in Boston. When most of the company’s value depends on people behaving well, that becomes an ethics and compliance matter.
Ethisphere’s own research shows the financial premium that follows when companies succeed through ethical business practice. Case in point: The the publicly traded honorees in the 2026 cohort of World’s Most Ethical Companies® outperformed a broad global benchmark by 8.2 percentage points from 2021 to 2025.
“I’m not saying we have causation,” says Ethisphere’s Chief Strategy Officer Erica Salmon Byrne, “What we have is a decade and a half of correlation.” The practices that earn a company a spot on that list are the same practices any well-run business needs. The premium reflects that broader discipline.
Why Hotline Volume Understates Speak-Up Activity
The real test happens when an employee must decide whether something is worth mentioning to someone. Most programmes don’t track that moment at all.
At Mitratech’s Interact session, “From the Risk Register to the Boardroom,” on 6 October 6 2026, Erica Salmon Byrne shared her own organisation’s internal numbers: for every employee who reports through a hotline, about three go to HR and four go to their manager. Her concern is the gap it points to: “That is what keeps me up at night, because who knows what’s happening in the delta.”
Ethisphere’s culture data, drawn from more than four million employee responses across 300-plus organisations, found that 59% of employees who raised a concern took it to a manager, 11% used an ethics hotline, and 8% used a web portal. Either way, the hotline is a minority channel. Most reporting activity never touches it.
The reason employees stay silent is shifting too. Fear of retaliation used to be the dominant explanation. At the Interact session, Salmon Byrne shared the more common reason now is harder to fix with a policy: “it is now nothing would happen, so why should I bother.” The employees who trust the system least are the youngest: “the people who trust the systems least are our youngest employees, our Gen Z folks.” With Gen Z projected to make up roughly a third of the global workforce by 2030, according to figures ManpowerGroup attributes to the World Economic Forum, employers should consider how to earn that generation’s trust in the systems meant to hear it.
What Metrics Should Boards Track for Ethics and Compliance?
Manager engagement moves these numbers. According to Ethisphere, 67% of employees report misconduct they observe when their managers regularly discuss ethics and compliance topics, against 37% when managers never do, a 30-point gap on the same question.
This is also what US prosecutors ask about. The Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs guidance asks whether a compliance programme is a “paper program” or one that is actually “implemented, resourced, reviewed, and revised,” including whether the organisation maintains “an efficient and trusted mechanism by which employees can anonymously or confidentially report allegations” and, citing the Sentencing Guidelines, reporting “without fear of retaliation.” The channel-mix ratio and the manager-engagement rate speak to that question far better than a hotline count alone.
Our recommendation: Present the board with the ratio between formal and informal channels, alongside how often managers are raising these topics. Track the gap as a leading indicator, not hotline volume alone. That is how a board sees whether the 92% of market value that never shows up on a balance sheet is actually being protected.
Seeing both numbers in one place means pulling policy, training, and case data out of separate systems and onto a single timeline a board can read in one sitting.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of a company's value is intangible?
Do employees report misconduct to a hotline or to a manager?
What should compliance teams track besides hotline reports?
Key Stats at a Glance
| Figure | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 92% of S&P 500 market value is intangible (up from 17% in 1975) | Ocean Tomo, Intangible Asset Market Value Study | 2025 |
| 8.2 percentage point outperformance, World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees vs. a global benchmark | Ethisphere, Ethics Premium | 2026 |
| Of employees who raised a concern, 59% went to a manager; 11% used a hotline; 8% a web portal | Malthe Helt, Ethisphere | 2025 |
Sources
- Ocean Tomo, 2025 Intangible Asset Market Value Study
- Ethisphere, “Ethisphere Announces the 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies” (Ethics Premium)
- Ethisphere, “Why Managers Matter: The Critical Link Between Culture, Ethics, and Trust in a Workplace” (Malthe Helt, 2025)
- ManpowerGroup, “World of Work for Generation Z in 2025”
- U.S. Department of Justice, Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (Updated September 2024)
