By Kevin Anderson BBC News Online reporter in Las Vegas

Author and humorist Mark Twain once said that Congress was the only criminal class native to the US, but after the last year, many are coming to think that corporate titans might well be added to Mr Twain's list of ignominy.

Enron, WorldCom and Tyco lost billions of dollars and the confidence of the public due to scandalous corporate behaviour.

Now even the mere whiff of scandal can send a company's stock swooning, giving companies an economic incentive to conduct their business ethically.

And one company at Comdex is touting its software to help train employees to do the right thing.

Ethical dilemmas

"Businesses realise that ethics is not just a nice thing to do. There is an economic motivation to do the right thing," said Josh Sharfman, senior vice president of products with LRN.

LRN's software presents employees with ethical dilemmas so that when they face such a predicament, they have a clear idea of where the line lies between ethical and unethical behaviour.

In one scenario that has eerie echoes of some of this year's corporate scandals, an employee puts pressure on a whistleblower not to go to authorities with concerns about a pharmaceutical company's new drug.

LRN is doing quite nicely out of corporate scandals

The employee hears how the company has spent $15m in developing the drug and how her friend will lose his job.

The software walks employees through several situations and exercises like this, helping employees understand company policy and proper ethical behaviour.

Sector survivor

The company's software actually is used in a wide range of corporate training.

Some of it relates to company policy such as the guidelines for the proper use of e-mail, sexual harassment policies or equal opportunity guidelines, which govern the hiring of minorities in the US.

But, the company also sells training for anti-trust and anti-competition law, environmental compliance and other regulatory issues.

The company does not sell software but rather delivers its services over the internet.

It is one of the success stories in the once hot sector of application service providers, or ASPs.

Near the end of the dot.com boom, ASPs were seen as a promising sector where companies could buy software services over the internet instead of buying software that would need to be loaded on individual machines.

The business model was seen as promising because instead of relying on cyclical sales and frequent upgrades for revenue, ASPs had a more predictable revenue stream.

ASPs also make sense for educational and training services such as LRN provides.

If a regulation changes and affects training materials, LRN makes the change, which rolls out instantly for all of its customers.

Although a promising concept, many ASPs suffered the same fate as other internet-related companies after the dot.com collapse.

Well positioned

But LRN's customers say that web training has revolutionised their training procedures.

Before, there was a necessary trade-off between in-depth training and training large numbers of employees, says Richard Pierce, director of compliance for mining concern Rio Tinto and an LRN customer.

"Historically, if you wanted to be train people in depth, had to have smaller group in front of you," Mr Pierce said.

Web-based learning like LRN is revolutionary in that it allows Rio Tinto to train large numbers of employees in great depth, he said.

And the software allows the company to accurately track who has successfully completed the training.

It helps a company like Rio Tinto that deals with anti-trust regulations and environmental compliance to show that they have shown due diligence in training their employees in case they find themselves under scrutiny by a regulator, he added.

Mr Pierce said that LRN is well positioned to take advantage of the heightened awareness of business ethics because it allows companies to train a lot of people and make sure they understand the company's code of conduct.