Every fall I begin planning the agenda for the Compliance Week annual conference. This is one of the best parts of my job, since it lets me spend lots of time talking to compliance executives in the field, hearing first-hand about their problems and what they think is important to discuss. I spent most of last week doing precisely that, so allow me to share some of their dispatches from the front lines here.
First, as always—compliance officers are struggling with how to teach ethics to their employees. Last year, one person summed up the problem eloquently: “If I can solve the ethics problems, most of my compliance problems become much smaller. So I'll worry about ethics over compliance any day of the week.” This year, another person summed it up with a more practical perspective: “For Pete's sake, my company is spending twice as much on compliance today as we were 10 years ago, and our employees are still making the same mistakes. So where the hell is my money going?”
Both are correct. Again and again, as I spoke with members of my Compliance Week 2012 advisory board and with potential speakers at our event, they all worried about ethics. How do you keep instruction about ethics fresh and engaging, when you often need to convey the same basic lessons year after year? How can you make an ethics officer or department appear approachable, rather than preachy or—in one executive's words—“as popular as the secret police?”
Second, a more telling insight comes from what compliance officers don't want to talk about, rather than what they do. Nobody wants to hear yet another lecture about continued aggressive enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or about the corrosive effects of ceaselessly expanding CEO pay, or about any number of other high-profile issues that have been hovering over the compliance landscape for years. What they really want, I heard time and again, is practical instruction on how to run their compliance departments well.
I found that message—that compliance officers are more worried about the small, practical challenges of their job, more than the large, conceptual ones—fascinating. It tells me that those large, conceptual challenges are relatively well-understood; the FCPA was a big deal in 2008, it remains so today, and presumably will continue to be a big deal in the future. Frankly, it also tells me that compliance officers are awash in legal bulletins, auditor alerts, and solicitations from other conferences, and all of those messages simply say, “Here's what you should worry about.” Compliance officers know what they should worry about. Their struggle is about how to do their jobs.
Hence I heard plea after plea for help with how to conduct an internal investigation, or how to ensure a technology upgrade goes well, or how to build a useful toolkit of surveys, checklists and other documents that help you build an effective compliance department. One advisory board member called it “compliance in a can”—and as hokey as the name is, it fits. Compliance officers are overwhelmed, and need help making their lives simpler.
One other message I heard time and again: the need for more overseas expertise. Compliance officers don't just want a primer on internal investigations; they want guidance on how to interrogate an employee who works in Brazil with its system of civil, rather than common, law. They don't just want to know China is a risky place to do business; they want to know how to investigate fraud their, right down to details such as the trustworthiness of the fa piao, a government document that functions like a receipt. We won't even get into the complaints I heard about Africa and the Middle East.
The Compliance Week annual conference (coming up June 4-6 in 2012; you can sign up for early-bird registration today) will reflect all those worries and needs in all their detail. I'll also be giving more updates about our 2012 conference agenda in coming months. For now, however, take those dispatches above as proof that no, you're not alone. Everyone else in compliance feels just as overwhelmed as you do, and apparently with very good reason.