Rise of the corporate ethics officer. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has inspired a resurgence of a thought-to-be-extinct executive: the corporate ethics officer, an official responsible for preserving a company's reputation by preventing scandals.

A recent Associated Press (AP) report charted the rising influence of the corporate ethics officer. In the last three months alone, roughly 100 U.S. companies have hired ethics officers, whose duties often include training employees, offering guidance, pre-empting discrimination claims, and curbing the wayward actions of company execs.

According to the AP, the ethics officer first came to prominence after the defense contracting scandals of the Reagan era, when firms bribed officials with funds in exchange for information they could use to improve their contract bids. A second surge of interest came in the early 1990s after new U.S. sentencing guidelines promised decreased fines for firms that adopted ethics programs. The current rise in ethics officers' stock follows myriad scandals that have all but destroyed once-stellar U.S. corporations such as Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, which were all felled by executive wrongdoing and ethical missteps.

"What we've seen are examples of companies with a culture of, `I don't see anything, I don't know anything'," Ed Petry, executive director of the Ethics Officer Association, told the AP. "People are not willing to speak up, people are willing to go along. That points to a systemic failure."