Does your compliance program assessment do this?

Does your compliance program assessment do this?

In a recently issued draft book chapter Jennifer Arlen of the New York University Law School addresses a wide range of issues facing the Compliance Function, including program assessment.   She provides a very useful list of assessment methods.  

Among other things, she writes that companies “can obtain the information needed to make these assessments through (1) internal reporting hotlines; (2) decision advisory hotlines; (3) well designed surveys given months after training to assess employees reactions to scenarios implicating choices between compliance and profits; (4) exit interviews; (5) adoption of an analytic detection system that incorporates data from internal hotlines, HR complaints about unethical behavior (including sexual harassment), consumer complaints, and (6) carefully calibrated performance indicators that can raise red flags about potential misconduct. Advances in AI assisted monitoring of performance and transaction data may also prove a boon to identifying ‘red flags’ or anomalies in data that may be predictive of suspicious conduct.”

Some of this is obvious but is still worth including for the sake of completeness. And other parts are not obvious, meaning they should be – but aren’t – included in some companies’ program assessment.

Most importantly, there are many other topics beyond assessment in Arlen’s chapter and I hope you have the opportunity to explore the whole draft https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4502973