How are you answering the new regulatory agenda?

After a period of “light touch” regulation, one big impact of the credit crunch that led to a global period of recession is a new era of regulatory inspection. The new agenda in regulation focuses on the public demand for increased accountability and action.

This point is fully made in the new Kroll Fraud Report which calls out the consequences of this new regulatory focus.

Some key points to take away from this are:

• You need to join up thinking in one area with what is happening elsewhere in your business. It’s no longer good enough to perform well in one area of regulation, if you have a huge compliance risk waiting to happen in another area.

• More resources are being aligned by the regulators to following up on what they find – so as a business you not only need to understand and mitigate your risks but be tackling the heart of the issues that may exist in your business to reduce the chance of action being taken against you

• What is your internal attitude to risks and issues? Companies who regulate themselves and fully investigate are often treated more leniently than where it is the regulator who first finds that problem. By building an environment of trust and openness it’s more likely that problems will be highlighted, and from there resolved, than with companies with a blame culture where risks are both siloed and silenced.

Regulation can be seen as nothing more than an onerous responsibility. By creating an environment where the concerns of the regulator are built into the acquisition processes and the way you do business, there is the opportunity to spot and resolve issues before they even get anywhere close to damaging the way you do business.