General
Parsing Trump’s Latest Power Grab
Today I want to return to President Trump’s efforts to consolidate executive power, and what that might mean for regulatory compliance and corporate governance if he succeeds. Our latest example worth dissecting: his executive order issued last week to take control of independent government agencies. Those agencies include regulators near and dear to compliance professionals’…
Read MoreStudy Warns on Ethical Culture Disconnect
LRN released its annual compliance program effectiveness report last week, which is always worth a read to understand the challenges of holding your corporate culture together and driving it forward in a unified way. One big issue in this year’s report: a perceptions gap on ethical culture that exists between senior executives and other employees.…
Read MoreMore Musings on FCPA Enforcement
I wanted to share more thoughts today about President Trump’s order to pause all enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Lots of corporate compliance professionals have been talking about it — and while nobody has any clear sense yet of what comes next, we do have a better sense of the important questions to…
Read MoreTurning Around Compliance Programs
Most compliance officers will at some point in their careers find themselves needing to turn around an under-performing corporate compliance program. So today we have another Radical Compliance podcast interview, this time with a compliance officer who styles himself as a “turn-around specialist.” He had plenty to say about how to get under-performing programs back…
Read MoreMore Tips on Third-Party Risk
FINRA, the regulator for broker-dealer firms, published its annual report on regulatory oversight issues this week — and to little surprise, the report included a section on third-party risk and the internal controls that your firm should consider to keep those risks in check. The advice is useful to anyone in any business sector, so…
Read MoreCorporate Culture Under Strain, Part I
Compliance officers, we need to talk about corporate culture. It’s been going through some stuff lately, that stuff could have big implications for the compliance programs you so desperately want people to take seriously. First is the push to bring employees back into the office once and for all — full time, five days a…
Read MoreTalking AI and ‘Model Risk’
Today we have a heads up for all you compliance officers in the financial services sector: Radical Compliance and Forensic Risk Alliance will be hosting a webinar on Jan. 29 exploring the risks of artificial intelligence, and the new governance and risk management methods you’ll need to develop to keep those AI risks in check.…
Read MoreOptimizing the Right Compliance Vector
A compliance officer should always be ready to take a good idea wherever you find it and figure out how it might improve your compliance program. In that spirit, today let’s talk about a nifty phrase I stumbled across in the technology world that could help compliance officers immeasurably in these tumultuous days: finding “the…
Read MoreRebutting Resistance to Compliance Investments
Earlier this week I visited one of the larger compliance vendors in the market to talk with their sales staff about the pressures compliance officers face. Our discussion quickly centered on two questions. First, why do some companies decide not to invest in compliance capabilities? And second, what are some possible arguments that might change…
Read MoreOh Good Lord, Vendors
Compliance vendors, we need to talk. I can appreciate that selling compliance software is a challenging job, and sales reps need to be creative when trying to reach their compliance officers targets — but do we really need to be clogging companies’ whistleblower programs with product pitches? That, apparently, is the complaint of the week…
Read More