Everyone knows the old saying about how tough cases make bad law. What we’ve also discovered in recent years is that daunting business conditions make for desperate—and ultimately ineffective—compliance. The problem that continues to plague U.S. and global companies is that we have essentially swung from one perilous extreme to another.
We began during the early part of this century in a business environment where compliance programs were often window dressing. There was little if any effort to actually educate key business operatives as to what was required of them to ensure that a culture of compliance would prevail. No one much cared, really, until, to paraphrase Warren Buffet, “the tide went out, so we found out who was swimming naked.” Compliance was often the missing swimsuit. At the turn of this century, some public companies did not even have compliance programs.
