Compliance is Not the Problem

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2014-snell-roy-speaking-headshot-200By Roy Snell
roy.snell@corporatecompliance.org

On occasion, I get a little grief for being in the compliance profession. Sometimes it’s misguided because they think compliance professionals make up all the rules and they don’t like rules. But it’s still tiresome. There is a guy I have known for 29 years. He is socially awkward. Every time he sees someone, he manages to aggravate that person. He means well; he just has a bad habit of poking you in the eye every time he sees you. As a result, he is the former husband of my wife’s dear friend. Until this weekend, I had gone 29 consecutive years not letting his eye-poking get to me.

This weekend he made another negative wisecrack about Compliance. I wasn’t in a bad mood. I had just decided I was done with it, and said, “I don’t appreciate that and I don’t want to hear it anymore.” Afterward, I thought I probably should have said more. I should have explained to him why I was done with his negative wisecracks. He is in medical sales. A few years ago a law was passed outlawing giving physicians money or material gifts to influence their clinical buying decisions. Bribing doctors became illegal. It was felt that patient care decisions should be based on what was best for the patient, rather than based on the personal financial gain of the physician.

Moments after the encounter, I felt I should have said more because the irony was too great to pass up. I should have said: “The real problem isn’t compliance officers and compliance programs. The real problem is that people like you bribed physicians so you could make more money. Because a few people like you were behaving unethically, the government had to impose new, onerous, expensive, and complicated laws— on all of us. Despite the rule of law, you people continued to bribe doctors. Then, companies like yours paid big fines and suffered horribly bad press. Then, companies like yours had to hire compliance officers and implement compliance programs to prevent, find, and fix problems because people like you continued to bribe doctors. Compliance is not the problem; the problem is that you people behave badly.”

I just find it ironic that quite often the people who are aggravated by regulations, and compliance with the regulations, are the very people that caused all the regulations in the first place.

[bctt tweet=”@RoySnellSCCE #Compliance is not the problem” via=”no”]

8 COMMENTS

  1. Amen, Roy, to trying to make the policy and procedure naysayers realize how much easier it is to avoid the additional restrictions and changes set onto the path of success by only working fairly and within the rules they, we,sign on to abide by and oversee as within compliance.

  2. I completely agree with you, Roy. On the bright side,though, all the rule-breakers have helped to bring about the profession of Compliance, in which we’re employed. So, I owe my rewarding career to those rule-breakers and physician-bribers. Now, if all of us can just help our companies follow those rules in a positive way and look for opportunities to make our organizations even more stronger and compliant!

  3. Greg and Karen
    I really hope we are more successful in the future convincing people that they can prevent the imposition of more regulations by discontinuing bad behavior and supporting the compliance departments efforts.

  4. Such a great post. I think we all can relate to this encounter, those in Compliance and those in sales. I think of it often and what I’d like to see SCCE help with is how to have this dialogue more often in a positive proactive way, not as a reaction to those that point to us compliance professionals as the rules people or road blocks. I struggle to to put the benefits of compliance in hard ROI dollars that they can understand. Sales can say here is a dollar we contributed. Often the benefits of compliance in reputation, brand, profits, margins from operational efficiencies and mitigation of losses associated with risks or infractions are hard to prove because if we are doing a good job these expense or pain is not incurred.

  5. Roy, fully supported. They caused the problem and they are not aware, how their behaviour annoys colleagues and the public at large. And you know what, those fines they paid were then used as an excuse to raise their sales prices (after all, profits had to be maintained). And guess what: the public at large pays for the bribes, the fines and their sales bonuses!
    Pity guys like him, are so oblivious of their environment!

  6. Certainly true perspectives. For another point of view, I think there’s some image of the compliance professional or profession that isn’t accurate out there, and we can also possibly take a moment to clarify that with the naysayers as well. Hey, we’re actually pretty creative and helpful people with a passion for doing the right thing and making their worlds too better, safer and more successful for all.

  7. Roy is right. I have been a police officer as well as a compliance investigator. In both roles, I have heard people made snarky comments about what I was doing when, in reality, I was just responding to what they had been doing. Don’t get too frustrated, Roy. People like that just give us more job security.

  8. Meric

    I really don’t know if other professions have as many misguided perceptions as we do. I suspect many do. The problem is that these misguided people are interfering with our ability to get our job done. Ironically its a job these interfering misguided people want done.

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