4 Corporate Compliance Issues You Should Be Thinking About
Compliance is one of the biggest ongoing issues at most corporations. The topic is so broad, however, that you may feel like it's hard to nail down every area of concern. It's a good idea to sit down with a corporate lawyer at some point to discuss these four compliance issues.
Multiple Regulatory Regimes
The presence of regulations at the local, state, federal, and even international levels means that a business rarely is complying with just one set of rules. Although outright contradictions between these regimes are fairly rare, topics covered by one may now be covered by another. You may think your organization is in compliance only to receive a notice from a completely unexpected regulator informing you that you're not.
A corporate lawyer can help you identify which regulatory systems apply to your business. They also can draw up documents intended to satisfy regulators at each layer of the system.
Implementation
Filing reports and making sure you talk with all the regulatory agencies is a good start. Implementing compliance measures, however, oftentimes means checking the culture at your company and providing training. Implementation measures need to go beyond making sure, for example, that the maintenance staff knows what to do. Folks in the C suites also need to be onboarded with the compliance regime.
Working with Clients, Customers, and Partners
One of the biggest hidden sources of compliance failures often comes from third parties. For example, a health network might have a third-party IT services provider that certifies that all their systems are HIPAA-compliant. Only when a problem is found, however, will your company become aware of an issue. Actively working with vendors to ensure their holding up their end of the compliance regime is essential and that includes getting paperwork from those third parties to protect your company's interests if there's a problem.
Technology
A major technological challenge with compliance is the number of personal electronic devices that come into corporate buildings every day. This poses threats on all compliance fronts, especially with regard to privacy and securities laws.
Policies have to be implemented with an eye toward complying with those rules, but they also have to be implementable with the available technologies. This means implementing best practices for logins, encryption, and user access. On the legal front, it also means creating an auditable system that provides sufficient evidence for regulatory reporting, inquiries, and discovery during potential litigation.
Speak with a corporate lawyer for more information.
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