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31 Days to More Effective Compliance Programs

Day 24 – Updates and Feedback

One of the critical elements found in the 2020 Update is the need to use the information you obtain, whether through risk assessment, root cause analysis, investigation, hotline report, or any other manner, to remediate the situation which allowed it to arise. Your company should establish a regular monitoring system to address issues. Effective monitoring means applying a consistent set of protocols, checks, and controls tailored to your company’s risks to detect and remediate compliance problems on an ongoing basis. To address this, your compliance team should check in routinely with local finance departments in your foreign offices to ask if they have noticed recent accounting irregularities. Regional directors should be required to keep tabs on potential improper activity in the countries they manage.

These ongoing efforts demonstrate that your company is serious about compliance.

It is a function of the CCO to reinforce the vision and goals of the compliance function, where assessment and updating are critical to an ongoing best practices compliance program. If you follow this protocol, you will put a mechanism in place to demonstrate your company’s commitment to compliance by following the intentions set forth in your strategic plan. What should you do with this information? Put a strategic plan in place ready to implement your findings of continuous improvement by using the following:

  • Review the goals of the strategic plan. This requires that you arrange a time for the CCO and team to review the goals of the Strategic Plan, which the CCO should lead to determine how this goal in the Plan measures up to its implementation in your company.
  • Design an execution plan. The KISS method (Keep it Simple, Sir) is the best to move forward. This would suggest that there should be a simple and straightforward plan for each compliance goal to ensure that the goal in question is being addressed.
  • Put accountabilities in place. In any plan of execution, there must be accountabilities attached to them. This requires the CCO or other senior compliance department representatives to put these in place and then mandate a reporting requirement on how the task assigned is being achieved.
  • Schedule the next review of the plan. There should be a regular review of the process. It allows any problems that may arise to be detected and corrected more quickly than if meetings are held less frequently.

Continuous monitoring is a key step, but it is only the first step. It is not simply that you tested your compliance program but that you did something with the information you obtained to improve your program.

Three key takeaways:

  1. Innovation can come through a new way of thinking about and using data.
  2. Have the plan to use the information garnered in your monitoring incorporated into your compliance program.
  3. Always remember that Document Document Document is critical if the regulators come knocking.
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Innovation in Compliance

Operationalizing Compliance: Part 2 – Compliance Program Design Jennifer May and Xinia Pirkey

Welcome to a special five-part podcast series on Operationalizing Your Compliance Program, sponsored by Broadcat LLC. Over this series, we consider various ways to more fully operationalize your compliance regime, including the design and effectiveness of your communications, why the operationalization of compliance is a team sport, why simply data is not the answer, and how to avoid being overwhelmed. In Part 2, I am joined by Jennifer May and Xinia Pirkey to consider your compliance program design.

Highlights from this episode include:

·      Your communications should resonate with your employees.

·      Aesthetic draws an employee in, but content grabs their attention.

·      Clarity and relevance are key elements.

·      Document Document Document

For more information, go to TheBroadcat.com

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Everything Compliance - Shout Outs and Rants

Everything Compliance – Episode 110: Shout Outs and Rants

Welcome to the only roundtable podcast in compliance as we celebrate our second century of shows. Everything Compliance has been honored by W3 as the top talk show in podcasting. In this episode, we have the quintet of Jay Rosen, Jonathan Armstrong, Jonathan Marks, Tom Fox, and Matt Kelly with our fan-fav Shout Outs and Rants section.

1. Matt Kelly rants about the Department of Justice CCO certification requirement for Danske Bank.

2. Jonathan Marks rants about the recent FAA failure, which crippled the US airline industry.

3. Tom Fox has his first dual shout-out. His first shout-out is to US District Judge Middleton for sanctioning Donald Trump and his lawyer, jointly and severally for $938,000 and the recently deceased musician David Crosby.

4. Jonathan Armstrong rants about the Tory proposed law against publicizing small boats that would make showing or even talking about the Bayeux Tapestry illegal.

5. Jay Rosen shouts out to the NFL for the playoffs and for getting us the best four teams in the final four.

The members of Everything Compliance are:

  • Jay Rosen– Jay is Vice President, Business Development Corporate Monitoring at Affiliated Monitors. Rosen can be reached at JRosen@affiliatedmonitors.com
  • Karen Woody – One of the top academic experts on the SEC. Woody can be reached at kwoody@wlu.edu
  • Matt Kelly – Founder and CEO of Radical Compliance. Kelly can be reached at mkelly@radicalcompliance.com
  • Jonathan Armstrong –is our UK colleague, who is an experienced data privacy/data protection lawyer with Cordery in London. Armstrong can be reached at armstrong@corderycompliance.com
  • Jonathan Marks is Partner, Firm Practice Leader – Global Forensic, Compliance & Integrity Services at Baker Tilly. Marks can be reached at marks@bakertilly.com

The host and producer, ranter (and sometimes panelist) of Everything Compliance is Tom Fox the Voice of Compliance. He can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Everything Compliance is a part of the Compliance Podcast Network.

Categories
Innovation in Compliance

Why Sustainability is the Business Opportunity with Richard Blundell

Tom’s guest on this week’s episode of Innovation in Compliance, Richard Blundell, discusses the risks and opportunities associated with growth in the insurance industry. They talk about how to finance a company’s growth by understanding its risks. Business financing is trending towards sustainability, and Tom and Richard explore how companies can access capital by implementing sustainable practices and strategies.

A global environmental services and technology consultant with over 35 years of experience, Richard Blundell has extensive experience in senior executive management and consulting. Mergers and acquisitions, corporate and market development, and operations management are among his areas of expertise. His experience includes launching new businesses and managing growth-stage businesses around the world. He is also an advisor to the Prince of Wales Accounting for Sustainability charity.

 

Here are some key points Tom and Richard talk about: 

  • Richard talks about his professional background and current role as an advisor on sustainability.
  • Richard believes that sustainability in business leads to lower costs, less waste, more resource efficiency, better quality jobs, better employee engagement, and more access to capital.
  • In addition to improving access to capital, sustainability can also improve performance in public markets, lower capital costs, and lower debt costs.
  • Richard highlights that materiality is a way for companies to determine priorities and goals for sustainability, decarbonization, and ESG by considering what is important for both the corporation and its stakeholders
  • Quoting Paul Wellman, Richard tells Tom that working toward social, environmental, and economic outcomes can invigorate and energize an organization.
  • Sustainability can be a life insurance policy for the planet.
  • Companies without decarbonization plans may not have access to financing from banks and other financial institutions as they do not understand the risks associated with growth and may not be seen as providing a benefit to society, Richard tells Tom.
  • Richard believes that the circular economy aims to eliminate waste by keeping inputs and outputs at their highest utility throughout their life cycle.
  • Companies like Interface and Nike are committed to sustainability and continue to innovate and stretch their targets as they learn more about driving efficiency and process in the decarbonization journey.

 

KEY QUOTE:

“If I am going to finance a company’s growth, I want to finance a company that’s in the insurance industry as well. I want to finance the company’s growth by understanding the risks associated with that growth.” – Richard Blundell

 

Resources 

Richard Blundell | LinkedIn

Categories
Daily Compliance News

January 24, 2023 – The Funding Was Secured Edition

Welcome to the Daily Compliance News. Each day, Tom Fox, the Voice of Compliance, brings you compliance-related stories to start your day. Sit back, enjoy a cup of morning coffee and listen to the Daily Compliance News. All from the Compliance Podcast Network. Each day we consider four stories from the business world, compliance, ethics, risk management, leadership, or general interest for the compliance professional.

Stories we are following in today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

·       When is it time to step down.  (Bloomberg)

·       Elon Musk now says funding was secured.  (WSJ)

·       Dual purpose test upheld by SCT for attorney/Client privilege claim.  (Reuters)

·       Ukraine President vows action against corruption. (NYT)

Categories
Blog

Operationalizing Compliance: Part 2-Compliance Program Design

Welcome to a special five-part podcast series on Operationalizing Your Compliance Program, sponsored by Broadcat LLC. Over this series, I visit with Jennifer May, Director of Compliance Advisory; Taylor Edwards,  Director of Sales; Xinia Pirkey, Design Manager; Alex Klingelberger, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Jaycee Dempsey, Director of Customer Success. We consider a variety of ways to more fully operationalize your compliance regime, including the design and effectiveness of your communications, why the operationalization of compliance is a team sport, why simply data is not the answer and how to avoid being overwhelmed. In Part 2, I am joined by Jennifer May and Xinia Pirkey to consider your compliance program design.

May began that the key is relevance and clarity. If your training or communication is not relevant, it really does not “matter how perfect the design is or even how perfect the message is, if it is being shared with someone that’s the wrong person, it will fall flat”. In other words, your compliance team is “just wasting time blanketing the entire workplace with some piece of information that does not apply to most of them.” Regarding clarity, she said, “If you are not clear about what it is you want them to do, what the behavior is that you are trying to achieve, you will lose their attention there as well.” All of this can lead to wasted time for your employees and wasted effort for your compliance team, “potentially even starting to lose some credibility.”

Pirkey is a design professional so comes at these issues from a different perspective from May or myself. Pirkey said, “we use design, from my point of view, to leverage the content to be on point to the audience that will receive it.” As a design professional, you must always consider the user experience so “we have to think about the users and who we are trying to target.” She added,  “As a designer, I come in and I try to interpret the content and I try to interpret as much as I can and ask the questions, such as “Who is this for? What am I trying to say? How do I want them to read this step by step?” You must always be cognizant not only about the audience, but also how we are projecting to them.”

Next, we considered how effective content can create credibility for your compliance function or conversely, ineffective content can demean your compliance function credibility. Pirkey began by noting that it is all about content, intoning, “we start with content.” Interestingly, she said that “a lot of times this means that we’ve come up with a format, whether it is a decision tree, an infographic, a written piece of content or other; and it is in a manner we can project it as job aid to our audience.” She also noted that conversely, there are times “we have to go back to the drawing board and decide, OK, this does not work as a decision tree. We need to think about a different format, a contrast example, or another approach.”

We closed with a discussion of the ‘secret sauce’ to creating great compliance communications tools. May believes it “is that back and forth and the community of diverse voices that we have, because we all have such unique experiences in our professional backgrounds.” When you couple this with the intent and “focus on trying to help organizations make these communications as simple, easy, straightforward” you can begin to achieve great compliance messaging. “Blending these approaches, the design method, thinking in that way, being collaborative with each other, being open with each other, and then doing that same thing on the backside with our clients too; that is the secret sauce. That’s the thing that makes Broadcat successful and a really awesome place to work with and work for.”

Join us in Part 3 where we look at operationalization.

For more information go to TheBroadcast.com