Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers. Edition 1

Dear friends,

I'm delighted to welcome you to the first edition of Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers.

In this new journal, myself and a fantastic team of compliance and ethics professionals will bring you helpful advice, insights and news that is designed to keep you up to speed, offer you guidance and help you to deliver your challenging role.

We've also launched a website which we'd encourage you to follow as we deliver an ever increasing set of articles over the coming months and years.

Thank you, Joe.

Welcome

To kick off our first edition of Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers, we decided to interview our four Editors (Joe, Jeff, Rebecca and Adam) and asked them to share what the newsletter is about and the value it provides to readers. 

Q: What is Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers about?

A (Joe): Our purpose is literally to share ideas about ethics and compliance programs and provide answers to questions in this field. While there are many wonderful publications on ethics and compliance, we wanted to share various compliance ideas and provide practical answers for compliance professionals' questions.  We offer this to the wide variety of ethics and compliance professionals who work across different industries and around the world. We felt there was an opportunity to add value to our global ethics and compliance community with a newsletter that invites and shares different perspectives with a global audience.  We will share our newsletter through LinkedIn and also our website.

Q: What type of topics do you plan to cover? 

A (Rebecca): We are excited to provide a global platform that will allow for the sharing of ideas and answers that will touch upon many different areas of ethics and compliance. This could include topics such as anti-money laundering, tips and ideas from in-house practitioners across the world, updates on how compliance programs relate to antitrust enforcement actions in places like India and so many other topics. While we have lots of topics we plan to cover, we also invite our readers to tell us what they want to read about and areas where we can help them with ideas and answers. 

Q: Who should read Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers? 

A (Jeff): We hope that Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers will be a useful resource for anyone around the world who works in ethics and compliance, including those in related functions such as Human Resources, Internal Audit and Risk Management. We think our materials will be useful for experienced practitioners, as well as people who are earlier in their careers or new to ethics and compliance. It can provide guidance for those in government who deal with compliance programs, and those in academia who write about this topic. It will also be a valuable resource for students preparing for careers in our field.

Q: How often will Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers be published?

A (Adam): We plan to publish mostly on a weekly basis. There might be some periods where we might take a brief break for the holidays. The easiest way to make sure you see Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers in a timely manner is to subscribe to the newsletter.

Q: How can someone subscribe to Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers and is it free to subscribe?

A (Rebecca):  It is really easy to subscribe and absolutely free – either subscribe to our newsletter on LinkedIn or visit our website to subscribe there.

Q: Can I write an something for Compliance And Ethics: Ideas & Answers? 

A (Joe): We certainly welcome submissions and encourage anyone interested in writing for the newsletter to visit our website to read about how to submit a piece for consideration and our guidelines. For now we are limiting submitted items to 400 words, mostly for short descriptions of ideas or interesting questions. We do hope to have our platform grow to include pieces in multiple languages over time but for the time being we are focused on submissions in English. 

Incentives play an essential role in compliance programs. Here is one of the easiest steps.

Rewards can be financial, but there are other ways as well. One of my favorites is simply writing a commendation letter. The chief compliance and ethics officer can sit down, think about someone in the company who has helped promote the compliance program or the company’s values, and write a commendation letter, copy to the person’s boss. It can be as simple as being first to get 100% attendance at the code of conduct training, or it can be for quoting the code of conduct in a presentation. A commendation letter can go to someone who raised an important code of conduct question, or pointed out a flaw that needed to be remedied in an accounting control.

This type of recognition is one of the small steps that can help mold a company’s culture in positive ways. Of course, as a lawyer I will also remind you to keep a copy of every letter as part of your program’s records. For more on incentives, see Murphy, “Using Incentives in Your Compliance and Ethics Program” (SCCE; 2012),  

I hope you found today's journal valuable and, if you would like more analysis and insight please bookmark our website at ideasandanswers.com