Extract from Jim Gill’s article “How Regulatory Rulings Shape Compliance Best Practices”
How do you ensure that your business complies with every law, rule, and regulation that governs its operations? Are you doing everything you can to write sound policies, monitor compliance, and respond to issues? Specifically, how are you keeping your enterprise data safe?
Here are five best practices for compliance professionals:
1. Stay current and try to anticipate what’s coming.
The landscape of compliance changes constantly. If you wait until a new regulation is passed to learn about what’s happening in your industry or jurisdiction, you’ll be behind in implementing the practices needed to comply.
Making a daily habit of reading a variety of newsfeeds, trade publications, and industry newsletters is a great first step. It’s also important to stay abreast of topics adjacent to your specific focus: regulatory updates, legal rulings, cybersecurity protections, and data privacy rights to name a few.
2. Think broadly when defining reasonableness.
As a compliance professional, your goal can’t realistically be perfection; mistakes can and do happen. Instead, the goal is to establish reasonable practices that will prevent misconduct, decrease the likelihood of mistakes, and detect problems promptly when they occur.
But what does it mean to be “reasonable”? First, reasonableness must be defined. Where compliance professionals sometimes get into trouble is in interpreting their obligations—and therefore defining what is “reasonable”—too narrowly.
