Mike’s favorite Marx Brothers movie Day at the Races is a fitting analogy for the race to effective compliance. Mike shares his favorite lines from the movie after which the discussion focuses on 3 Best Practices Compliance programs from the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice and OFAC.
Tom points out that each guidance document has a different focus depending on who released it. The Antitrust Guidance for example, is focused on criminal antitrust behavior: that is, the intention to defraud the market based on market fixing, cartel behavior or other intentional acts by more than one group or person. Each one of the documents gives greater insight to anti-corruption practitioners to incorporate into their compliance program.
There are elements that are common to all three documents. Mike says this emphasizes the importance of operationalizing your program to cut through the silos that exist in compliance. Compliance now has a reason to bring together all these elements into one comprehensive training program.
The Criminal Division of the Department of Justice asks for continuous monitoring of the compliance program. We need to take the data and loop it back into the compliance program to continually improve. Antitrust monitoring takes a statistical look at contract data over long periods of time to discover indications of cartel or price-fixing behavior. Anti-corruption monitoring shows the need for overall transaction monitoring from a compliance perspective so that red flags or anomalies are detected early on.
Once you have a database of contracts you can now have effective business analysis. You can analyze discounts given to customers over time and compare and contrast profit margins of contracts by geographical area or business unit. This is going to put the Compliance at the table for business discussions going forward. Compliance now becomes part of the business plan.
Resources OFAC Compliance documentCriminal Division Compliance documentAntitrust Division Compliance document