The role of a compliance program is to prevent, detect, and remediate. This role works for any law or regulation a company is following. Certainly a FCPA compliance program assists a company in complying with the world’s signature anti-corruption law. If a company follows the prescriptions of the Ten Hallmarks of an Effective Compliance program as laid out in the FCPA Guidance and actually maintains compliance, it will have a compliance program that allows it to comply with other countries’ anti-bribery/anti-corruption laws.
The Man From FCPA has long argued that such compliance programs can make companies more efficient, better run, and, at the end of the day, more profitable. The average returns from entities that receive Ethisphere’s annual World’s Most Ethical Award would seem to bear this out. However there is another trend that demonstrates the effect of having compliance programs. It is the interest of institutional investors in environmental, social, and corporate governance issues. In an article in the New York Times, this is monikered E.S.G.
