COMPLIANCE MEETS THE ARTS
According to Nacho Abia, chief operating officer (COO) of Olympus Corporation, “Compliance is more art than science”. What could he have meant by this? To be sure, if we reduce the compliance function to its basics, it is all about complying with law. As a first step, the ruling law must be identified and internal regulations and processes created to inform employees what is expected of them. For various reasons, such as inexperience, ignorance or criminal intent, a certain number of employees may not follow the regulations. Inexperience can be countered by training, ignorance with dialogue, and criminal intent with effective controls.
Unfortunately, boundaries are not always visible, and attitudes may shift; if not adequately addressed, inexperience may turn into ignorance, or into criminal intent. It is up to the company, through its compliance office, in combination with other functions, to avoid this outcome. Ignorance can only be eliminated by a clear system, where humans and processes go hand-in-hand.
Topics like anti-corruption, free markets and sexual harassment, for example, should be easily understood by employees based on education, values and attitudes. These are basic rules for living in a society and part of being human. Nevertheless, since these problems do arise within organisations, it shows there is a risk that individuals can ‘unlearn’ being human.
Section 8B2.1 of the Effective Compliance and Ethics Program of the 2021 United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual, states that a “compliance and ethics program shall be reasonably designed, implemented, and enforced so that the program is generally effective in preventing and detecting criminal conduct. The failure to prevent or detect the instant offense does not necessarily mean that the program is not generally effective in preventing and detecting criminal conduct.”
Jan-Mar 2023 Issue
Patrick Henz