It is universally recognized that third parties are your highest FCPA risk. Could you turn your third party from liability under the FCPA to an innovation partner for your compliance program? This is an area that only a few compliance professionals have mined, but once again, in compliance, you are only limited by your imagination. In a Supply Chain Management Review article by Jennifer Blackhurst, Pam Manhart, and Emily Kohnke, entitled “The Five Key Components for Supply Chain Innovation,” the authors identified five components common to the most successful innovation partnerships. They are:
Don’t settle for the status quo. This means you should not settle for simply the status quo in compliance.
Hit the road to hit your metrics. To understand your compliance risk from third parties, you must get out of the ivory tower and hit the road.
Send prospectors, not auditors. While an audit clause is critical in any third-party contract, from a commercial and FCPA compliance perspective, you can establish a “point of contact as an innovation manager for your third parties.”
Show and tell. As with all relationships, trust plays an important role in third-party compliance innovation, as “Firms in successful innovations discussed a willingness to share resources and rewards and to develop their partners’ capabilities.”
Who’s running the show? This means “who is doing what, but also what each firm is bringing to the relationship regarding resources and capabilities.”
Three key takeaways:
- Use your third parties as innovators to assist your compliance program.
- Change your thinking about third parties and make them your partners.
- Do not settle for the status quo.
