Not long ago we held another of our Compliance Week editorial roundtables, in Atlanta with co-hosts Compliance 360, to talk about the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of your compliance program. Our full coverage of that discussion will appear in next week’s newsletter, but for now let me recap some of the most interesting points—because the more I ponder how you measure “effective” compliance, the more I realize how elusive that idea really is.
Regulation helps. We ended up with an unusual mix in our group of 10 participants: four attendees from the healthcare industry, four from retail or consumer goods, and two from public utilities. In other words, we had a split between one group that is highly regulated (healthcare) and another that is regulated much less (retail and consumer products). The difference was enormous. The healthcare folks reported excellent lines of communication with their regulators, and much more sophisticated systems to peer into their compliance efforts at any given moment in time. The retailers, meanwhile, said they still sometimes struggle to know exactly who their regulators are—a mish-mash of state agencies, local authorities, and federal regulators who each worry about one piece of what the retailer is doing.
