A compliance program is designed to ensure your practice complies with all laws and regulations that apply to it.
If it’s an effective compliance program, you have someone in charge to ensure the organization is following the proper guidelines, to maintain safety and security.
The difficulty is in driving human behavior. You can have the guidelines drawn up, well thought out, and well-established, and yet an untrained employee can put everything at risk with even the smallest of decisions.
Compliance programs impact organizations if:
They fail to understand the full risk - without taking the time to evaluate where all risk comes from, they fall short in establishing the proper guidelines.
They don’t have proper leadership - leadership sets the tone for everyone underneath. If you don’t make compliance an active part of your culture, your employees never will.
They don’t have proper resources - it’s difficult to cover all your bases if you’re a small practice. When you try and do everything with small budgets or lack of human resources, something falls short.
They lack proper training - for compliance to work, it has to be a part of the culture, strengthened through communication and training on a regular basis.
They lack proper monitoring - understanding and actively watching are two separate things. If you don’t know what to watch for, or how to analyze your position, it makes it challenging to ensure you're in compliance every day.
According to a report by Compliance Week and Deloitte, only 70 percent of forms try to measure how effective their compliance programs are, and only a third of them are confident they are using the right metrics.
To run an effective compliance program, ask yourself these three questions:
- Is our compliance program well designed?
- Are we implementing it effectively?
- Is it actually working?
With these three simple questions, you can start honing in on where your weaknesses are. It gives you a starting point as to what to work on first.
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