The grand theme for Compliance Week West, our West Coast event happening in November, is the proper care and maintenance of the compliance function at a modern, global organization. That means our agenda is packed with plenty of discussion about supply chains, measuring effective compliance, risk assessments, and integrated systems to monitor risk and compliance, of course. Still, when I sit back to ponder the underlying threats to compliance programs today, two words keep recurring: speed, and complexity.
Speed, in that the time between the emergence of some new risk and that risk’s actual occurrence has collapsed to zero. Any corporation today could have some far-flung employee wire an improper payment to a foreign government official, collect private data about customers in some insecure way, book revenue improperly, or commit (knowingly or not) any number of other bad actions.
