My New Website Compliance

Discussing compliance issues with a broad variety of people is an excellent way to develop additional insight. For that reason, I am more that willing to give a presentation to any in-house legal, regulatory, or compliance group that wants to learn more about compliance programs. That offer stands even for those that have no intention of using my or my colleagues' legal services--or for those we cannot represent due to potential conflicts of interest.

Joe Miller

Five Reasons to Create a Compliance Program

1. Reinforce your employees' commitment to acting with integrity.

2. Protect your company's reputation.

3. Reduce risk of substantial punishment (if an employee does violate a law or regulation, the enforcing authority is very likely to consider the effectiveness of an existing compliance program in determining sanctions).

4. Consolidate and preserve existing compliance efforts that may have be incomplete or reliant on the knowledge of a single employee.

5. Save outside counsel costs (compliance attorneys generally charge much less than white collar defense lawyers).

"A survey of 160 business leaders at 46 multinational organizations concluded the cost of non-compliance far outweighs the cost of maintaining compliance. The findings on average showed a cost of $9.4 million for compliance failures, which far outweighed the $3.5 million annual cost of maintaining compliance."

Knowledge Management for the Natural Gas Transmission Industry (2011)