Three Values Working Together
Compliance, anti-fraud, and ethics should be three interconnected values that work together. Consider them a triangle, with ethics at the top. Without ethics, your anti-fraud and compliance programs are vulnerable. Take away compliance or anti-fraud efforts, and you could compromise the ethical environment that you are trying to establish. You need an integrated program that fosters an organizational commitment to all three.
The Role of Ethics
Every company has a commitment to ethics. The problem occurs when you create an ethics program that is too abstract. In attempting to address every possible situation at a high-level, the program becomes cumbersome and quickly grows stale. You need an ethics program that is focused on the real-world situations that you face every day and works in harmony with your compliance and anti-fraud efforts. Ethics is the most important component of your company’s culture, permeating everything that you do. The ideal approach is to develop an ethics program that is fully integrated with your compliance and anti-fraud policies.
Your Compliance and Anti-Fraud Experts
At Wellfleet Strategies, our firm is built on some of the best compliance and anti-fraud people around – an extensive network of attorneys, former regulators, high-level government officials, forensic accountants, and enforcement specialists. When we work with a client, we build a team specifically suited to your industry that has deep knowledge of the laws and regulations you have to navigate. We also evaluate where you are susceptible to fraud, and what measures you need in place to guard against it. We then build a pro-active compliance and anti-fraud program designed to avoid the problems that can bring you down.
Integrating your compliance and anti-fraud efforts with your ethics program serves as an important backstop to any potential issues. It can help sensitize your people to potential issues before they happen, and give them the means available to avoid non-compliance or prevent fraud before they occur.
Top-Down and Fully Implemented
One of the most important steps in this process is working with your executive team to ensure that your management structure has a deep understanding of your program and how it works. We then work closely with you, through training, workshops, and day-to-day monitoring efforts, to make sure it is fully implemented. Along the way, we can recommend any necessary changes that will help you realize a fully integrated ethics, compliance, and anti-fraud program that meets all of your business’s needs.
