Compliance Perspectives SCCE

By Adam Turteltaub



Corruption is a well-known risk in Latin America, but how great the risk is on a country-by-country basis is less well understood. To fill in those blanks and many more, the law firm Miller & Chevalier just released its 2024 Latin America Corruption Survey.



The firm has been fielding this survey every four years since 2008, reports Matt Ellis, Latin America Practice Lead. It provides comprehensive, country-by-country data as well as, more granular information on the risks of dealing with various governmental entities.



This year’s report, he shares on the podcast, had interesting news for the compliance community. It found that, although corruption remains a pervasive problem, corporate compliance programs, more so than enforcement, are perceived as being the key driver for change.



The survey also revealed significant nuances in the anticorruption risk picture:



* Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica are generally perceived as the lowest risk countries

* Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras and Argentina are on the riskier side

* In general, political parties are perceived as being corrupt as well as municipal governments

* Brazil’s customs authority, Peru’s judicial branch, Argentina’s executive branch and Mexico’s police and local governments were all singled out as areas of concern



Listen in to learn more about what the survey revealed, including corporate trends in investing in anti-corruption efforts.

By Adam Turteltaub



How do you tell someone something that they don’t want to hear in a way that they will listen? How do you overcome your own desire to avoid the conversation?



To better understand why people hesitate to have difficult talks and how to communicate more effectively, especially when the conversation is going to be a tough one, we spoke with Jason Rosoff, CEO of Radical Candor (podcasts).



People hesitate to speak candidly, he explains, for a number of reasons. For one, they may fear that the conversation will harm their relationship with the other person. They may also be nervous about facing a negative reaction, or even retaliation, for speaking out.



To help challenging conversations go better, he advocates for radical candor, which he explains means challenging directly but also caring personally at the same time. Be clear about the problem, he advises, and what the potential negative consequences are. At the same time, though, show you care personally. That includes giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, avoiding sounding judgmental, and focusing on helping them.



It also means being willing to listen to the other person’s side.



Listen in to learn more about how to have better conversations and how to avoid the more common traps that we all can fall into.

By Adam Turteltaub



ISO 27001 is the leading standard for information security management systems. As Mel Blackmore, CEO of UK-based Blackmores explains, it is a framework that applies and is of value regardless of an organization’s size, sector or country.



Organizations seek ISO 27001 certification to ensure that their IT security reflects best practices. It also brings to organizations a systematic approach to work in this area. In addition, potential business partners will have greater confidence that your organization has robust data defenses.



Most organizations have a head start when it comes to becoming ISO 27001 certified. Many existing IT security practices are likely to be consistent standards. To get the rest of the way to certification, she outlines several steps including:



* Determine where your organization is already compliant

* Conduct a gap analysis

* Performing a risk assessment

* Creating policies and procedures



Listen in to learn more about meeting this important ISO standard and what it will take to maintain certification.

By Adam Turteltaub



What do we do with ESG? Is it a part of compliance? Something different? How do we handle it?



Renee Murphy, Distinguished Evangelist at Diligent argues in this podcast that while there are compliance aspects to ESG, it is best to quickly make it a part of operations and under the general risk management structure.



Of the three elements of ESG, it is the environmental sustainability side, she believes, that will be the most challenging. With new requirements for organizations to report on their fossil footprint, companies are being forced to march into unexplored territory. As a result, they will need to evolve their process, which, she believes, will become easier as management comes to understand the balance sheet implications.



Listen in to learn more about what is happening with ESG, and what compliance teams need to know.

By Adam Turteltaub



Healthcare enforcement is never quiet. There’s always something, or many things, going on, and compliance teams need to stay on top of the trends to ensure that their programs are staying ahead of the risks.



To find out where things are today, we spoke with Ronald Chapman II, author of the book Unraveling Federal Investigations, defense attorney with Chapman Law Group and president of Chapman Consulting Group.



In this podcast he identifies several areas of intense enforcement activity:



* Drug testing labs are under scrutiny, particularly around the number of panels and reflex testing

* Telemedicine continues to be a hot area as well

* Venture capital firms are entering healthcare and/or deepening their investment, often with complex payment arrangements and without sufficient antikickback review

* Aggressive telemarking in the durable medical equipment space persists

* Credentialing issues, especially for smaller entities, are resulting in non-payments and fraud allegations



On the criminal side, he notes that controlled substance prescribing is in prosecutors’ eyes, often coupling these cases with fraud charges, leading to a one-two punch.



Listen in to learn more about what healthcare enforcement authorities are doing and how to strengthen your compliance efforts.

By Adam Turteltaub



Creating the right corporate culture is an idea that’s sacrosanct in the field of compliance and ethics. The folks at Gartner, though, are challenging that belief.



In this podcast Chris Audet, Vice President and Chief of Research for General Counsels and Chief Compliance Officers, tells us that their newly released report finds that focusing on key quality measures in the compliance program may be more important.



The firm reached the conclusion after surveying over 1000 employees about the situations that lead to employee noncompliance. To quote from the press release, “In the survey, 87% of respondents said they faced situations where they didn’t know how to comply in the last 12 months, followed by 77% of respondents who experienced situations of rationalization and 40% experiencing situations of malice.”



Improved quality standards – the design and accessibility of policies, training and so forth – had much more of an effect on reducing uncertainty than culture did. As he notes, when employees are faced with uncertainty, the key thing is to have easily accessible policies and a workforce that knows where to find them.



Most troubling, of course, is the reportedly high temptation, not always acted on, to be noncompliant for malicious reasons. Listen in to learn more about the challenges of malice and rationalization and how quality standards may help there as well.