Building and Maintaining an Effective Compliance Program

The ethics, corporate compliance and anti-fraud functions have faced a rapid growth in the last few years. Such a growth was explained as a kind of response to several high profile governance failures and subsequent regulatory reforms. Organizations throughout the whole world are now making huge investments in compliance, ethics and fraud prevention, launching their compliance programs, building risk management systems, rolling out comprehensive mandatory trainings and communication plans, designing and distributing compliance standards and procedures, and engaging their employees through so called tone from the top. This trend has touched companies from various industries and markets even from those that are traditionally receiving less regulatory attention. Nowadays, when most of the organizations have already established some basic level of compliance, anti-fraud,and ethics infrastructure, many of them begin to evaluate whether these are effective enough. This paper sets forth several ideas, tools, examples, and solutions tending to help and support the organizations in either building or preserving their effective compliance programs