A Compliance New Year’s Resolution – Assess the Company’s Culture

The topic of ‘company culture’ is certainly not new, but it continually emerges as a hot topic within regulatory circles. An organization’s culture is recognized to exert a powerful influence on how a company and its people conduct business. Although there is an inherent understanding that by continually enhancing company culture, ethical aspects of the organization will follow suit, why isn’t culture reviewed with the same rigor and principles that are required for compliance programs? This article will discuss the importance to evaluate an organization’s culture of compliance, and will introduce some considerations on how this can be done.

At the start of every New Year, we hear people discussing, exchanging, making and breaking New Year’s resolutions. Why should the company compliance program be any different? Frankly, we do not think it should. Therefore, for 2018, we propose that assessing the company’s culture top the compliance New Year’s resolution list.

Here are a couple of reasons why culture assessment should top the list.