Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers. Edition 16

Dear friends,

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Compliance and Ethics: Ideas & Answers!

In this edition, firstly I will share with all of you how I got into compliance and ethics. Having been in this field for probably as long as anyone alive, I thought it might be useful to provide my own personal answer to this question.?After that we will understand the value of a C&E week or month or even day written by Rebecca Walker , before looking at a quick thought on standards and controls and culture written by Adam Balfour .

As always, there's more content on?our website ?so please do visit that to read our other articles.

Thank you, Joe.

How did I get into compliance and ethics?

By Joe Murphy, CCEP

Many of us get this question:?How did you get into the field of compliance and ethics??Historically it has been by chance, i.e., your company started a program and “voluntold” you to run it. As more educational institutions offer programs and degrees in this field, however, we will hear stories of planned careers in compliance and ethics. ?

I started practicing law in-house in 1976 in the old Bell System.?My area was antitrust and early in my corporate tenure I was doing antirust compliance. I was an antitrust lawyer practicing antitrust law. Simple enough.?We did have a corporate code of conduct, we did have some messaging from HR about discrimination, we did get safety bulletins, but initially I did not connect any of that with what I was doing.?In antitrust I reviewed materials and worked with the managers who dealt with competitors. I provided antitrust training to the employees and managers.???

When I started there had just been a dramatic new development in training.?Commonwealth Films came out with a docudrama called “The Price.”?I loved it. It was personal and people were captivated.?It brought antitrust crimes down to real-life experience.?Remember, this was 1976-77!?There were no lawyer lectures on the video. I even opined at one point that to do antitrust training and not use The Price was equivalent to in-house malpractice!

Gradually, through the practice of reviewing pending legislation for our company and some odd litigation regarding the business of recycling telecom equipment, I started getting involved in environmental matters and a bit of environmental compliance.?Shortly after I started at Bell we also had to deal with the newly-enacted FCPA (enacted in 1977).

Compliance as a separate field.

Here is what I noticed from all of this.?Safety, antitrust, FCPA, environmental – compliance in each area had a need for the same types of tools and approaches.?I started to see a distinct similarity.?In contrast I thought of one of my Penn Law classmates, Dave Glyn.?Dave and I were both lawyers.?I did corporate antirust; he did wills and estates.?We were both labeled “lawyers” but with very little in common in our work.?Then I thought about the person doing environmental compliance and the person doing workplace safety and the one doing FCPA.?I compared their work to what I was doing.?It dawned on me that they had more in common with me than my law school classmate. It was at this point that I started to develop the concept that compliance was not a subset of being a lawyer, but was a field all its own.

I also started to see that this field was not about law, but about management.?Everything you did in an organization to get people to do anything you also had to do in compliance. The way you managed people for business purposes also what you needed to do in compliance.??I was particularly interested in the use of incentives.?I dealt directly with salespeople and saw how they were incentivized.?I realized that compliance also needed a place in that compensation and reward system.?These were all ideas that I could see from those early days.

Values and ethics

There was also the issue of values and ethics.?As a Bell employee I knew our two top values, because you could not miss them:?safety and phone service.?No matter what happened, people had to be able to complete their calls. And no matter how rushed or important the job, you did it safely.?For example, I could not drive a vehicle for Bell until I passed their own safety exam. Every Bell office nationwide had a picture of a lineman working in foul weather to keep the lines open.?Every office had a sign that said “no job is so important that we cannot take the time to do it safely.” ?We had one million employees (before that was even imaginable for any other company).?And when one of our employees was killed on the job, every employee in the Bell System got a flier printed on red paper telling us what happened.?This was very serious stuff.?

Later on, as I continued to do antitrust work but also came across other areas of law and compliance I started writing about parts of this idea.?In the mid-80s I caught up with my college mentor, Rutgers Professor Jay Sigler.?I explained these concepts to him, and he concluded we needed to write a book about this.?Previously there was written material about compliance only in specific risk areas such as antitrust and environmental compliance.?It was still considered just part of practicing law in those risk areas. There was certainly writing on antitrust compliance, for example.?But nothing that went beyond that. No one related antitrust compliance to workplace safety or anti-discrimination efforts or FCPA.

In the defense industry there was in the 80’s a forced, big push among contractors to clean up their acts from government contract fraud.?They were reaching out to expand the scope of what they were doing in compliance, but still within the concept of their risk area.?

Continue reading this article on the website.

The Value of a C&E Week or Month or Even Day

by Rebecca Walker

I just got started working with a client on planning their annual Compliance & Ethics Week, which will likely roll out in October.?I must admit, when I first heard the term “Compliance and Ethics Week,” many years ago, I was skeptical.?The SCCE launched the initiative way back in 2005 (nearly twenty years ago!) as a tool for companies to use to increase recognition and awareness of companies’ C&E programs.?The concept seemed just a tad too gimmicky to be effective.?

Turns out, once again, I was wrong.?Clients’ early efforts to use a C&E Week in their programs did sometimes sputter or even fall flat, but we have come very far in the nearly twenty years since the SCCE introduced us to C&E weeks.?And many other compliance-related functions (Privacy Week, Cybersecurity Week, Workplace Safety Week) have jumped on the bandwagon.

The success of a good C&E Week campaign lies in the variety of ways that organizations communicate and the concentrated nature of the communications.?For some organizations, over the course of one week, the C&E team will send out videos, emails, and posters; manage contests that include fun (yes, they can be fun!) prizes; set up tables that contain C&E goodies at appropriate sites; host live presentations at a variety of sites; host an outside speaker at an organization-wide town hall; and provide fresh material on the C&E area of the intranet.?C&E weeks may also (for lucky organizations with a good budget!) include site visits by the C&E team to locations that do not typically get enough “face time” with C&E staff.

Continue reading this article on the website.

Standards and Controls and Culture

by Adam Balfour

One of the things I often notice when I visit Japan is that most people will wait patiently at cross walks even if there is no traffic coming. While there are similar controls and standards to other places (traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and penalties for jaywalking, etc.), a key difference is culture and how people - both individually and collectively - interact with those standards and controls.

Standards and controls are (of course) important to compliance, but culture is what will “make or break” standards and controls and determine whether or not (and how) they will work in practice. You can develop as many well intentioned and well thought standards and controls as you want, but they not be effective in practice if the culture of an organization is not properly considered when building and designing any standards and controls. As important as standards and controls are, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Lisa Monaco summed it up well in September 2022 when she said “As everyone here knows, it all comes back to corporate culture.”

Read this article on our website.

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