Navigating Compliance Concerns

By: Terrance Oben OBEN LEGAL                                   

THIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES PRACTICAL STEPS THAT companies can take to successfully embed a positive compliance culture and outlines a proposed approach to developing and implementing a compliance program that can be used globally, regardless of industry or the size of your company.

Understanding the Compliance Risk Framework

As a core function of corporate governance, compliance plays an integral role in achieving an organization’s primary objective— maximizing shareholder value and protecting company assets. To achieve this objective, companies must deploy sustainable internal and external long-term strategies focused on enduring operational performance, while protecting the interests of their shareholders and other stakeholders.

What Are Compliance Risks?

Every organization is unique, and so are its costs for doing business. Generally, compliance risks can be viewed as the possibility of present or future loss/damage to an organization’s integrity because of a failure (or apparent failure) to comply with laws, regulations, or other applicable business standards. Therefore, compliance risks are business risks—because they require organizations to conduct business activities within a set of prescribed ethical and/ or legal boundaries. In the context of this article, damage to an organization’s integrity includes legal or regulatory sanctions, financial loss, and damage to reputation, market share, customer base, or contracts.

To read the full practice note in Lexis Practice Advisor, follow this link.

Terence Oben, Esq. is Managing Counsel at Oben Legal in New York, NY. His practice focusses on corporate governance, ethics, and compliance, assisting domestic and multinational organizations in a variety of industries design, develop, and implement programs and strategies that ensure decision-making, resource allocation, and business activities are aligned with appropriate ethics and compliance considerations for the organization's circumstances. Mr. Oben designs a variety of management mechanisms and tools that organizations use to operationalize legal requirements and integrate ethics into practices. www.obenlegal.com

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