This week I am exploring a five-part series on compliance as seen through the lens of Winnie the Pooh and the characters who live in the Hundred Acre Woods. Today I discuss Pooh’s best friend, Piglet, and use Piglet to consider the role of finance in a compliance program.
Piglet has some great adventures (or sometimes misadventures), such as giving Eeyore a birthday balloon that pops or getting lost in the Hundred Acre Wood mist and helping to rescue Pooh and Owl after they are trapped in Owl’s fallen house. My favorite Piglet tale is when Eeyore mistakenly offers Piglet’s house as a new home for Owl after his house has blown down. Piglet nobly agrees to let Owl have the house, at which point Pooh asks Piglet to live with him, and Piglet accepts. This poignant story shows the true meaning of friendship and any Pooh story I know.
I cannot think of any character more able to illustrate the role of finance in compliance than Piglet. He is obsessed with keeping things neat and tidy and sometimes has an inferiority complex, although his friends think highly of him. Sort of like finance.
Finance has roles in the prevention, detection and remediates prongs of any compliance program. In the prevent prong, this is most particularly true around offshore payments, generally defined as payments made to a location other than the home domicile of the payee or the location where the services were delivered. If a Tunisian agent who performs services in Dubai asks for payment in a location other than Dubai or Tunisia, that will qualify as an offshore payment. If you train people in finance on this issue, they may well pick up the phone and notify compliance when they see a request for payment in a geographic location separate from one of the two standard payment venues. When properly documented, those types of communications demonstrate that your compliance program is operationalized into the fabric of the organization.
The bottom line is that not only can finance be one of the compliance function’s strongest corporate allies but that the role of finance, by its nature, works to operationalize compliance. This is because to implement the appropriate internal controls around compliance, finance must know the specific requirements of compliance know what kinds of issues are likely to come up that might create a risk of bribery and corruption, all leading to an understanding of the appropriate compliance internal controls to implement around payments.
Join me tomorrow when I conclude with Winnie the Pooh and his influence on the Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer (CECO) role.
