Enterprise Compliance Portal – an Outline

Background

International organisations are facing major challenges due to increased national and international regulatory scrutiny. To comply with various regulations and protect brand and reputation an explicit, comprehensive and coordinated compliance framework is required.  Implementing electronic tools enables companies to monitor compliance with centrally-set compliance standards, both to improve the overall level of compliance, but also to provide a mechanism to help defend the company’s position in the event of a compliance breach.

Fragmented and re-active approaches have led to inconsistent and ineffective responses.  Senior level leadership has an increased need for strategic information on key compliance risks. Evidence needs to be collated to provide assurance that key risks are being managed effectively, based on self assessment against compliance standards.  The result is visibility across an international business of key compliance risks and associated mitigation.

In order to help with the challenges outlined above, PricewaterhouseCoopers has developed an electronic compliance tool (‘Enterprise Compliance Portal’ or ‘ECP’). This tool has been successfully used within the PwC Global network for the last three years to support PwC’s own compliance framework, and is also for sale to other companies.

Solution

Some of the features of the ECP are:

• Profiling of compliance risk across all entities
• Validated management self-assessments on an exception-basis provide the basis for an objective executive-level dashboard of compliance status
• Use of a balanced scorecard set of minimum standards with associated performance objectives and indicators, including for example business conduct and anti-bribery – integrated within the overall performance management approach
• Risk scoring of compliance risks based on a risk rating and assessment of mitigation effectiveness
• An emphasis on driving actions, establishing improvement plans and changing behaviours
• Web-based dynamic reporting/access allowing visibility across the business of exceptions and remediation status
• A vehicle to collate and report statistics from various E-learning programmes, for example like anti-money laundering training, ethics and business conduct familiarisation programmes

Outcome

The key benefits of this approach are:

• Visibility on key compliance activity, with the global risk and compliance team able to demonstrate that remediation is being performed for key compliance risks
• Automated compliance reporting providing summary snapshots of compliance activity and exception reporting around developing hotspots (dashboards etc)
• Self-certification with the minimum of red tape had driven clear ownership of compliance plans by business management
• Top-down objective setting and bottom-up feedback on the extent of compliance, has driven personal, behavioural and organisational changes and established a basis for sustainable compliance.

On this website you will find a short video clip on the ECP.   Do not hesitate to contact me if you require any further information.