What Is Corporate Compliance and Why It’s Important?

The Importance of Corporate Compliance

Corporate compliance should be an essential part of your business operations, regardless of size or industry. How does your business manage compliance and mitigate risk? Taking preventative measures can feel like a hassle up front. Still, it can save you untold organizational costs in the long run.

Corporate compliance violations can result in fines, penalties, lawsuits, loss of reputation, and more. Keep your business from learning the lesson the hard way. Start developing a compliance program today. This article will define compliance, what it means for your business, and how to create a successful compliance program.

What is Compliance in Business?

The definition of compliance is “the action of complying with a command,” or “the state of meeting rules or standards.” In the corporate world, it’s defined as the process of making sure your company and employees follow all laws, regulations, standards, and ethical practices that apply to your organization and industry.

Corporate compliance covers both internal policies and procedures and federal and state laws. Enforcing compliance helps your company prevent and detect rules violations, protecting your organization from fines and lawsuits. The compliance process should be ongoing. Many organizations consistently and accurately govern their compliance policies over time.

The Purpose of a Corporate Compliance Program

The purpose is to protect your business. It’s as simple as that. But the return on investment could be significant, helping you avoid waste, fraud, abuse, discrimination, and other practices that disrupt operations and put your company at risk.

Your corporate compliance program needs to be integrated with all compliance efforts enterprise-wide, from managing external regulations and internal policies to comprehensive employee training. By ensuring all departments and staff are working together to maintain standards, you can mitigate the risk of significant failures and violations.

An effective program improves communication between leadership and staff. It should include a process for creating, updating, distributing, and tracking compliance policies. After all, employees can’t be held responsible for rules and regulations they don’t know exists. But once they understand expectations, your staff can stay focused on your organization’s broader goals and help operations run smoothly. What’s more, when employees are adequately trained on compliance requirements, they are more likely to recognize and report illegal or unethical activity.

Maintaining compliance equips your employees to do their jobs well, reach their career goals, and keep customers happy. In turn, your company can achieve its goals and grow faster.

In the unfortunate event that your organization faces a lawsuit, your corporate compliance program will help in court.

As one report from Rutgers School of Law explained, “An organization that has made a robust effort to prevent and detect violations of the law by its employees and others acting for it will be treated less harshly than one that was indifferent to complying with the law.”

How to Create a Successful Corporate Compliance Program

Very few businesses can afford to procrastinate on a corporate compliance program. Don’t let hindsight be 20/20 for your organization. Have the foresight to take action today.

Your program should be carefully planned and implemented, with coinciding training programs to guarantee personnel are well-versed in all areas of compliance. Here are a few steps to establish or refine your corporate compliance program:

Your corporate compliance program won’t run itself. One person should be assigned the responsibility of managing the program day-to-day.
Depending on the size of your organization, you could have one compliance officer or several. Regardless, those in charge of the compliance program must have the authority to enforce the rules and hold staff at all levels accountable.
They also need direct access to its governing body, including senior management or the board of directors.
Access to senior management and authority to enforce rules is essential when potential compliance issues arise, empowering your officers to respond quickly. But communication goes both ways. The governing body needs to regularly assess the corporate compliance program’s effectiveness.

Corporate compliance fosters a workplace culture that values integrity and ethical conduct. This starts at the top. Your leaders need to follow the rules for the program to work. They should encourage ethical behavior and openly talk about the importance of compliance.

Company leaders should encourage employee input, emphasizing that they won’t be punished for reporting unlawful or unethical behavior.

The Department of Justice created a checklist for evaluating corporate compliance programs and suggested asking the following questions:

How have senior leaders encouraged or discouraged the type of misconduct in question through their words and actions?
What concrete actions have they taken to demonstrate leadership in the company’s compliance and remediation efforts?
How does the company monitor its senior leadership’s behavior? How has senior leadership modelled proper behavior to subordinates?

Conduct Risk Assessments

Corporate compliance is about managing risk. To build an effective program, you need to know what compliance areas pose the highest risks to your organization. Once you have identified these areas, you can focus your resources on addressing them.

Federal and state regulations, as well as industry standards, are continually evolving. To avoid the risk of non-compliance, it’s essential to conduct regular assessments. The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) suggests conducting a risk assessment once a year.

A formal assessment process, like this one recommended by the ACC, can help your organization be proactive about preventing corporate compliance violations:

Audit results
Recent litigation
Compliance complaints
Employee claims
Industry enforcement trends
Compliance policies in each risk area

Establish and Maintain Your Code of Conduct, Policies, and Standards

Your corporate compliance program needs a well-defined code of conduct. Why? Because it can help define your program’s purpose and set expectations for behaviour.

The code of conduct acts as a foundation and should explain the following key points:

Who is responsible for managing the program
How employees should report misconduct
Disciplinary measures for violating the code of conduct

Your corporate policies should build on top of that foundation by providing guidelines for specific areas of compliance. For example, they may address common corporate compliance violations:

Corporate corruption
Bribery
Tax practices
Conflicts of interest
Record retention

The list goes on. But the exact areas you need to address will depend on your industry.

Once risk areas have been identified and policies created, you should establish procedures to help employees carry out policies correctly. Creating step-by-step guidelines makes it easier to follow procedures and identify non-compliance.

Risk areas in specific industries may require additional standards. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act may require you to keep detailed protocols for screening third-party business partners.

Properly Train All Employees

Compliance policies and standards are useless if employees don’t follow them. After establishing the policies and procedures for your corporate compliance program, you need to disseminate them to every member of your staff.

Ensure company officers, employees, and third-party vendors read and sign off on all compliance policies and procedures.

All employees and relevant vendors should be trained on laws, regulations, corporate policies, and prohibited conduct. Depending on the size of your organisation, you may want to conduct training tailored to specific employees in high-risk areas.

The ACC recommends that you track, document, and follow up on training. By implementing a compliance policy and training management tool, you can accomplish this and automate many of your manual processes. The right software lets you distribute policies, conduct online training, create custom tests, and more.

Improve Your Compliance

Creating or revising your compliance policies and training takes a lot of work. It’s an ongoing process requiring consistent monitoring and updates. But don’t wait until an incident has occurred to take action. If you and your compliance officers are already busy and time-constrained, finding the right time to implement a new program can be hard. The trick is finding a compliance management solution that fits your organization.

If you’re ready to take control of compliance, and protect your business from risk, learn more about CRI Group™ compliance solutions and discover how we can help your corporate compliance program.

Compliance Solutions by CRI Group™

Due Diligence 360° | Third-Party Risk Management 3PRM™ | Anti-Money Laundering Solutions

CRI Group’s compliance solutions are tailored to your organization’s needs, helping assure compliance in all areas and keeping you one step ahead of regulatory requirements.

Money laundering is a serious global issue, and recent legislation is aimed at requiring organizations to follow strict anti-money laundering protocols.

Our Due diligence 360° services provide the specialized intelligence needed by global financial institutions and multinational corporations to guarantee complete compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and legislations.

Manage your third-party risks confidently with customized 3PRM™ solutions for your organization or get certified. CRI Group’s own exclusive, expert-developed 3PRM™ services help you proactively mitigate risks from third-party affiliations, protecting your organization from liability, brand damage and harm to the business.

Whether your organization has a large, well-established third-party program, is in the early stages of development, or is anywhere in between, 3PRM™ solution can improve the health of your program and future-proof your entire business in many forms.

CONTACT US TODAY

WHO IS CRI GROUP™

Based in London, CRI Group™ works with companies across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia-Pacific as a one-stop international Risk Management, Employee Background Screening, Business Intelligence, Due Diligence, Compliance Solutions and other professional Investigative Research solutions provider.

We have the largest proprietary network of background screening analysts and investigators across the Middle East and Asia. Our global presence ensures that no matter how international your operations are, we have the network needed to provide you with all you need, wherever you happen to be.

CRI Group™ also holds B.S. 102000:2013 and B.S. 7858:2012 Certifications; is an HRO certified provider and partner of Oracle.