IT’S hard to read media without running into a new story about different kinds of corruption, collusion and rule breaking. Whether or not the stories we read are true, organizations caught up in them often lose credibility.
Reputation isn’t the only thing to take a hit, but the cost of litigation also. With increased sensitivity to corruption and compliance violations, it’s never been more important for companies to protect themselves with the latest in compliance technology. I like to add that the implementation of the Data Privacy Act (DPA) through the National Privacy Commission forces organizations to employ Data Protection Officers (DPOs) and have Compliance Technology in place.
The explosion in digital data, a hardly available talent pool of compliance professionals and DPOs to draw from, and a more complex risk ecosystem are presenting serious cost, resource and efficiency challenges for compliance. As businesses go global, many are confronted with complexities of international regulations and distinct cultures. As a result, new technologies are emerging to help consolidate compliance functionality.
In order to help realize a more transparent and fair business climate, companies and tech innovators will need to work closely together to change their industries. They can do so by investing in new technologies that make corruption more visible and easier to address.
One of the best ways to avoid these sorts of controversial mistakes is by evaluating where other companies, brands and organizations have gone wrong in order to develop measures to prevent your company from doing the same. In the past, reviewing compliance and corruption blunders was more difficult, but as we all know, with the advance of digital media and research tools, understanding the complexities of existing cases has never been easier.
Many important legal and regulatory documents are still on paper or hosted locally on one person’s hard drive. In order to upgrade the accessibility of crucial documents, processes and best practices, companies will need to adopt platforms that can streamline their compliance processes.
In order for companies to modernize their compliance strategy, they’ll need to make their approach more agile. Streamlining corporate compliance efforts could eventually prevent organizations from becoming entangled in costly lawsuits and public scandals.
As these technologies make solutions more accessible to all kinds of organizations, the desire for better solutions grows. Accenture recently asked executives to list the top 3 compliance challenges they think will have the highest impact on their business, to which “respondents most often cited fraud and financial crime risk [cited by 48 percent of respondents], business risk [47 percent] and cyber risk [45 percent].”
It seems clear that there is much work to do not only in taking corporate ethics and compliance to the next level but also in raising the moral consciousness of societies.
The goal of compliance is to enable organizations to streamline their critical compliance data. If they do so, we can expect to see an increase in transparency, which will hopefully lead to less cases of corruption and save companies the costs that are associated with regulatory errors.
The complexity of compliance management and understanding that the safe journey into data protection needs automation inspired me to create a cooperation with Straits Interactive, a company in Singapore that has developed the online Data Protection Management System, to equip professionals, managers and executives with the competencies to perform their jobs in data protection. The DPMS is not only assisting in the compliance with the Philippine DPA but also with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. If you need more information on DPMS, let me know.
Feedback is welcome; e-mail me at Schumacher@eitsc.com.