Bailey Naples (baileynaples@berkshirefarm.org) is Director of Risk Management and Corporate Compliance for Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth in Canaan, NY, USA.
There are a number of compliance articles about how companies may have a Compliance department that they don’t utilize. Upon accepting the recent opportunity to continue my career with a new organization, I have been experiencing a whole new dynamic. The CEO does not just support Compliance, he encourages it. The tone he has established sets up the executive suite to consider compliance within their departments on major projects and in their everyday tasks. The company is a voluntary agency: a not-for-profit that assists youth and families through such means as residential treatment centers, group homes, foster care, and preventive services. Voluntary agencies are heavily regulated (they are working with children after all), but as we know, heavily regulated industries don’t automatically become the beacon of Compliance (consider a bank not being compliant yet being heavily regulated). This heavy regulation creates a need for compliance, but it doesn’t create a desire for compliance. That is where the support of the CEO and senior management comes in.
More work
Let’s be honest. If you want to skate by and “just do your job,” you may be in the wrong field. Compliance is ever evolving, and as such, when supported by the executive suite, it means much more work. There was a fantastic article in the January 2018 Compliance & Ethics Professional magazine entitled “The foundations of your compliance program: Keeping your regulatory library spinning.” The article discussed the importance of remaining up to date on the regulations affecting your industry. By doing so, you are always finding more work to do. Rarely are regulations created that result in less for a company to do.[1]
The following sections describe different ways in which the CEO can support compliance, and it is recommended that they are all utilized. Hopefully you will be able to share this with your CEO (if you aren’t the CEO) so compliance can be encouraged within your organization as well.
