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Importance of ethics and moral standards in business
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Corporate Compliance Checklist
The world of business is full of different regulatory and legal requirements. In order to fulfil the responsibilities, companies must create a program of comprehensive compliance.
All industries have their own regulatory requirements, combined with specific standards and ethical practices to follow. Effective corporate compliance is essentially about having a process in place that guarantees the company follows and meets the laws, regulations, standards and ethical practices that apply to them.
Corporate compliance is not just about the national and local laws and regulations. A good corporate compliance program will also pay attention to internal policies – the specific ethical and practical standards the company wants to adhere to. It is about
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These elements are:
1. Leadership – The corporate compliance culture should be built on strong leadership and the support from different layers of the management structure. Compliance officers must be high in the hierarchy of the corporation.
2. Risk assessment – The company must also pay attention to risk assessment and not just focus solely on following a set of rules. A risk assessment will provide a more enhanced view of the compliance obligations and helps the organisation to prioritise. This is also a crucial element in terms of due diligence.
3. Standards and control – Corporate compliance should have three levels of standards and controls in place:
a. Code of Conduct – Expressing the ethical principles of the company.
b. Standards and policies – Outlining the policies built upon the Code of Conduct, mainly dealing with issues such as bribery, corruption and accounting practices.
c. Procedures – Implementing procedures that ensure the above policies and practices are implemented, followed and
Compliance is pertaining to the adherence to laws and regulations that the company is subject. Raven Head Ranch did not follow this objective when they were writing checks approved by the same person and putting them in unapproved projects, for example the Volunteer Fire Department. The VFD had been receiving funds from misappropriate accounts for three years. Fifty individual disbursements were taken from the community checking account and had no proper recording, just charged to random accounts, which breaks the regulations and laws of proper accounting. One of the BoD members, Sam, was not even a resident of RHR and was on board supervising the employees with no legal right
The compliance plan should include a code of conduct. By establishing a code of conduct, the organization establishes a commitment to ethical and accurate coding practices that will follow all regulatory guidelines set forth.
According to the International Labor Organization, “Different to labor law, business codes of conduct do not have any authorized definition. The concept “corporate code of conduct” refers to companies’ policy statements that define ethical standards for their conduct. There is a great variance in the ways these announcements are enrolled. Corporate codes of conduct are finally voluntary. They can take a number of formats and address any issue – workplace issues and workers’ rights being just one possible category. Also, their application depends entirely on the company worried.”
The COSO Internal Control—Integrated Framework provides a blueprint for implementing an internal control system to assist in ensuring the reliability of financial statements and compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. The purpose of internal control is to provide reasonable assurance in achieving internal control objectives: Effectiveness and efficiency of operations Reliability of financial reporting Compliance with laws and regulations
Both roles should ideally be independent of operations, but corporate compliance in reality owns the compliance operation policies and procedures. Internal audits have to be completely Independent. Internal audits also bring attention to the need for monitoring as a result of their auditing function. Corporate compliance ensures that monitoring and auditing occur. As far as follow-up goes, corporate compliance is responsible for such things, while internal audit is just responsible for reporting whether management responded appropriate to obtained information. Both roles are involved in compliance risk. Corporate compliance creates and implements a compliance plan to ensure that compliance risks are addressed. Internal Audit on the other hand, addresses compliance risks as part of risk based audits.
At first, the organization has already set up a compliance plan, and it is committed to ensuring that it will comply with the entire set standards. To illustrate, it works effectively to recognize and predict any corporate integrity agreement risk in the organization. On the other hand, the company is committed to providing training to the employees on various issues (Vaidya, 2013). Also, there is a copy of corporate integrity agreement and policies related to it in each department, and there is a certified trainer does a round to explain any thing that is not understood in the agreement monthly.
Open Communication and Transparency were strong focus which was achieved through global programs. These programs depleted communication gaps between top level executives and employees through middle management. Siemens also introduced departments such as “Ask us” and “Tell us” help desks, where staff could clarify their compliance related queries and report compliance issues respectively (CGMA® bRiefinG Rethinking the value chain Ethical culture change at Siemens: A case study). The Siemens Compliance system is setup to undergo continuous change so that it can respond to the insights obtained from the compliance committees. In quarterly Risk Radar meetings, experts from compliance committees, along with the external auditors, analyze the possible misconducts and provide recommendations to improve the compliance system (The Siemens Compliance System Prevent – Detect – Respond and Continuous Improvement).
In order to act within compliance managers will need to adjust their organizational processes accordingly. To succeed in a global economy, Madhani (2015) professed that “MNCs have to thus manage multiple economic, legal, political and cultural environments externally as well as complex networks of knowledge and resource flow internally” (p. 5). Each of these situations may call for a manger to use the contingency approach, in finding the right way to deal with each pressing circumstance. For instance when dealing with economic variables they may need to rely on the decision theory, which would take into account market analysis, trends and other information before making a decisions (CSU-Global, p. 4). As a result, several different management styles would be effective when pertaining to different situations. Therefore, when knowledge is applied the correct approach would go into the
The Company is committed to conducting business ethically and in accordance with all laws and regulations. The Company’s Code of Ethics is a guide to help our employees contribute to the culture of integrity by establishing principles for how we as employees conduct our daily business. Each employee’s acknowledgment and adherence to the codes is a condition of employment.
A compliance officer is an employee whose responsibilities include ensuring that the company complies with its outside regulatory requirements and internal policies. It is crucial that a compliance officer possess and maintain a high ethical standards and honesty since they are responsible for making certain that a company adheres to required conduct of employees (Safian, 2009). When interviewing for a position in a facility to work as a compliance officer, the employer will be looking for certain skills and abilities that are required to do the job successfully. These include communication, leadership, organization and coordination skills, planning, analyzing and implementing. Employers are looking for people who have a master’s degree in
5. Apply your code of ethics to a written policy and procedure manual identifying the major rules for operating your business.
Standards and conduct (that an organis. sets itself in its dealings within the organisation and outside with its environment
However, the validation of whether the organization is in compliance doesn’t come from the organization itself. The public, stakeholders, community, and the government validate the compliance of the organizations based on its disclosures of internal information (Burlea, 2013).
The idea of developing and implementing corporate compliance program is to avoid improper conduct, promote adherence in organization’s legal and ethical obligation as well as effective competition among the firms.
A company’s culture helps to define who that company is. The culture within a company is influenced by the values, morals, and behavior set by management and the board of directors (Cohen, 2015, p. 347). A company’s culture helps to define a company’s corporate governance (p. 347). The culture lays out the corporate governance of an organization, it sets the tone for the business (p. 347). Enofe, Amaria, and Hope (2012) express that corporate culture is the personality of your company (p. 92). In addition, the authors note corporate culture is defined as “the shared values, traditions, customers, philosophy, and policies of a corporation; also the professional atmosphere that grows from this and affects