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Brandon Spooner on Compliance in Brazil [Podcast]

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When compliance professionals think of Brazil, they tend to focus, rightly, on the corruption challenge.  Many may miss the fact, thought that it is also a very large economy, in fact it is one of the world’s ten largest.

In addition, the country has a very sophisticated business community and a substantial investment in compliance.  So much so that it is the SCCE’s second largest country by membership.

At the 2017 SCCE Basic Compliance and Ethics Academy in Sao Paulo I wat down with Brandon Spooner, the founder of Spooners Consulting to discuss the challenges.  In this conversation he shares his insights on a wide range of topics:

  • How far from hopeless the corruption is in Brazil
  • The challenges of cross-border compliance
  • The scope of the Brazil Clean Companies Act
  • The challenges of multiple enforcement authorities within Brazil
  • The need to fully understand the culture before diving in, including the importance of personal connections

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2017 Compliance & Ethics Institute Session Previews

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By Doug Stupca
SCCE/HCCA Social Media Coordinator

The 2017 Compliance & Ethics Institute is just a month away. With over 100 different sessions to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which sessions and speakers will be the best for you. Luckily several speakers have created previews to their sessions! Here is a small collection of them to help guide you: [Read more…]

Compliance Officers Are Going to Get Arrested, Shot, Killed and Then Arrested Again and Sued

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 By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org

Lately, there’s been another rash of articles floating around online about compliance officers in trouble and speculating whether the government is going after compliance people.

It’s a neat trick to get attention and turn up the paranoia-o-meter for compliance people.  But, if you read the articles carefully, you’ll see that the fears are often overblown. [Read more…]

Another Morality Tale for Compliance Officers

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By David Dodge, CEO
Sports Officiating Consulting, LLC
david@sprtsoc.com

Jack Ewing’s recently published book titled Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal chronicles the decline and fall of Volkswagen, once the largest automaker in the world and now the object of derision and scorn and struggling for its life under the weight of nearly $22 billion in fines and settlements.

As readers may be aware, Volkswagen has pleaded guilty to charges it equipped its diesel engines with software – dubbed “defeat devices” – which enables an engine to meet emissions standards when tested in a lab, while on the road the diesel engines continue to emit nitrogen oxide in amounts as high as 40 times the legal limits. [Read more…]

Are You in Compliance? Listen to That Little Voice

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By Frank Ruelas
Facility Compliance Professional, St. Joseph’s Hospital
and Medical Center/Dignity Health

Let’s be frank (sorry, couldn’t resist).  I am going to make some very overarching assumptions which may or may not hold true 100% of the time.  However, I feel they are correct much more than not.  Some of these assumptions include:

  • People generally have a good sense as to what is right and wrong;
  • People tend to know when they are doing something they should not be doing; and
  • Every day types of compliance related decisions are usually the type that don’t require a meeting of the compliance committee or a special task force to analyze.

[Read more…]

Deloitte Report

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By Joe Murphy, JD, CCEP, CCEP-I
Compliance Strategists

Hi, Colleagues – I just read a report posted by Deloitte, that the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled on May 9, 2017 (BGH 1 StR 265/16), that compliance management systems are to be taken into account in determining penalties. According to the Deloitte report:

  1. For the assessment of a fine imposed on the company, the court shall take into account to which extent the company fulfilled its duty to prevent legal infringements committed within its sphere of responsibility and has put in place an effective compliance management system.
  2. Such CMS has to be designed to avoid violations of laws and regulations.
  3. For potential mitigating effects, a court also has to consider whether or not the company has made efforts to improve its CMSin order to make a possible future repetition of the investigated infringements at least more difficult. A court even has to take into account the efforts made during the ongoing proceeding.

As explained to me by Dr. Petra Linsmeier, legal counsel experienced with German law, these rules spelled out by Germany’s highest court in civil and criminal matters would apply to fines under the Administrative Offences Act in general (which is also relevant for competition law).

As readers may know, one glaring exception to the positive approach to compliance programs shown by regulators and enforcers around the world has been in antitrust and competition law.  In the past, both the US DOJ’s Antitrust Division and the European Union have refused to credit any compliance program, no matter how diligent.

This trend has shifted, however, and the Antitrust Division showed more flexibility in the recent past.  In Europe some national authorities have also become more flexible.  This ruling by the German court represents another major step.  It certainly gives parties in competition law proceedings in front of the Federal Cartel Office a good reason to stress the importance of their own compliance initiatives.

Here is the site for the Deloitte report

Cheers,  Joe

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HIPAA ALERT: Forgotten Physical Safeguards Lead to Stolen Records

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By Margaret Scavotto, JD
Director of Compliance Services
Management Performance Associates

In June 2017, an Illinois mom found two medical records in her middle schooler’s belongings.

This mom discovered that some of her daughter’s peers had stolen nursing home records from an abandoned nursing home, and passed them around at school.  The records included medications, doctor’s notes, diagnoses, social security numbers, addresses and other protected health information. [Read more…]

What Will the Next War Production Board Say?

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By Stacy Nykorchuk, CCEP

Sometimes, a vintage book catches my eye, and it’s a nice break from the modern writing I spend most of my time-consuming. One of the imprinted pages in this book sent me on a mental tangent before I’d even gotten to the first story. A note about the appearance of books in wartime… from a time when everyone knew that there was an actual war at hand. The message, one of conservation and even business consideration to the greater good, is one that might be reflective of a different period in time. In short, I’m not sure we’d see this in the 21st century.

Can you imagine this message today? First, we’d have to all agree what wars or conflicts merit a cooperation effort. Next, we’d have to decide what to conserve, and get businesses to buy in without playing their own war games through litigious delay. This is where I see the real struggle. Do we need to curtail trees from print material or terabytes from our digital content? Maybe the effort would revolve around what is published, as wars are fought with information (and we’re in a generation with more access to, and theft of, information than ever)… is there a need to save manpower these days?

With so many experts and advocates of publishing and digital publishing, with respectable, diverse opinions, I’m not confident we could reach a swift consensus to action. Is a sense of duty enough, or would we need legislation, a new War Production Board, to compel compliance? If the latter route is pursued, it better be well written, because we all know there are fine lines worth testing between the letter of a law and the spirit of a law. By the time that’s determined to any satisfaction, the military action in question may even be over, rendering the whole effort irrelevant (better luck next time).

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The Fireside Book of Dog Stories. Edited by Jack Goodman, Introduction by James Thurber; Simon And Schuster, New York, 1943.
About the author – Stacy Nykorchuk (CCEP) has spent fifteen years in college or university systems, either as a student or professionally. She is interested in operations efficiency, and promoting critical thought and elegant solutions within the academic workplace. Currently managing regulatory compliance programs in the for-profit higher education sector, she is also an instructor for online undergraduate courses and practices writing and editing. She can be reached at stacy.nyk@gmail.com

Path of Totality – What can Compliance Professionals Learn from the Eclipse?

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By Sherrie King
Compliance Auditor, Appalachian Regional Healthcare System

A colleague shared a post on HCCA.net today simply asking others to share where they were located along the “Path of Totality” of today’s Solar Eclipse. Some responded they were in an area where they would only experience 60% – 70% totality; others were in areas that would experience totality in the 90% – 99% range, while some were in the direct path and would experience the eclipse at “totality”. Some had even traveled to areas where it has been advertised would be the best viewing areas to experience totality. As I read the responses, the thought occurred to me “What lessons can we as Compliance Professionals learn from this natural phenomenon regarding how we see risk in our organizations?” [Read more…]

Ethikos Editor’s Weekly Picks: How to Make Ethics Training Stick

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Examining ethics and compliance issues in business since 1987

How to make ethics training stick

By Mark Athitakis  for Associations Now
Ethics matters. On this, everybody agrees. The CEO will tell you that. The ethics seminar leader will tell you that. Even the staffer who was catching up on email while half-listening to that last ethics webinar everybody had to watch will tell you that.

Recognizing the importance of ethics is one thing. But getting people to actively engage with the issues that workplace ethics presents is another. Read more

Opinion: Here’s how you know if a company is behaving badly

By Ann Skeet for Market Watch
One multinational company headquartered in Silicon Valley used a culture assessment tool we’ve developed, with useful results. This company had a CEO and a lead independent director interested in signaling the workplace about the importance of ethics and a bias towards learning.  The discussion at the board meeting reviewing the results extended well beyond the original time allotted.  Read more

A leadership lesson learned on the battlefield

By Jonathan Aberman for The Washington Post
Subordinates are given autonomy to make rapid decisions in the moment, if necessary, to achieve the strategic goals of leadership. But it is not complete autonomy. Servant leaders require accountability against their expressed goals. This ensures that key values such as ethics and compliance with legal and other norms are honored and that the overall strategic objectives articulated by the leader are followed.  Read more

ACCA survey finds need for improved ethics in digital age

By Michael Cohn for Accounting Today
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has released a new survey raising questions about how accountants and businesses around the world are dealing with ethical challenges prompted by various technology trends.

Ethics was considered a “very important” skill in the digital age by 77 percent of the respondents, with more than nine out of 10 giving ethics a top rating. An above-average proportion of respondents in the nonprofit and public sectors indicated they considered ethics as “very important” in the digital age. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents called for strong ethical leadership, while a 54 percent majority called for guidance on a new code of ethics for the digital age. Read more

General Counsel: Guardian and conscience of the company

By Mark A. Cohen for Forbes
I was recently invited by the ABA to address a group of General Counsel on “Lawyers as Guardians of Business Integrity and Conscience of the Company.” The topic was chosen because of a spate of high-profile scandals and regulatory imbroglios that resulted in no small part from the failure of GC’s to discharge the guardian/conscience role.

General counsel—and large corporate departments– are law’s petri dish. They are reconfiguring the boundaries and expanding the expectations of what it means to be an effective corporate lawyer. Read more
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