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Compliance Management

Compliance holds significant importance in the manufacturing industry due to various reasons.  Compliance also plays a vital role in maintaining workplace safety, protecting employees from hazards, and reducing the risk of accidents or injuries.

In today’s complex business landscape, compliance has emerged as a crucial element of organizational operations. It ensures that companies comply with laws, regulations, and ethical standards, reducing legal risks, protecting reputations, and fostering responsible business practices. However, compliance goes beyond a mere checklist of rules and procedures. It is a mindset that requires a collective commitment to ethical behavior and doing what is morally right. This mindset is nurtured by a strong compliance culture, which forms the cornerstone of sustainable organizational success.

A compliance audit formally evaluates an organization’s procedures and operations, focusing on determining whether the organization is adhering to its internal rules, regulations, policies, decisions, and procedures.

Non-profit organizations play a crucial role in society by addressing various social, economic, and environmental issues. However, non-profits also face various risks, such as financial mismanagement, fraud, data breaches, and non-compliance with laws and regulations. To mitigate these risks, non-profits need to adopt robust governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management practices. In particular, compliance and… Continue reading A Guide to picking a GRC management software for Nonprofits

It’s a great feeling to be recognized!

We are extremely proud to announce that we received top G2 awards in 4 categories, including number one position in the ease-of-use category. The quarterly awards by G2 are a proof that VComply is accomplishing our mission to simplify compliance operations and help customers around the world to achieve their compliance goals

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) are three critical components businesses of all sizes must manage to comply with industry standards and regulations. GRC involves creating, implementing, and monitoring policies, procedures, and controls to mitigate risks and maintain transparency around compliance policies. Large businesses usually have dedicated teams and advanced technologies to manage their GRC processes.… Continue reading Guidelines to Buy GRC Software

Internal controls are an essential component of any compliance program. They are the policies, procedures, and processes that help to ensure that an organization complies with applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards.

Modern organizations face increasing pressure to operate safely, sustainably, and in compliance with various regulations and other requirements related to material use, supply chain, by-products, and environmental, health, and safety (EHS) practices across the globe.

Compliance is not just a set of rules to be followed, but rather it’s a culture that needs to be instilled within an organization. Compliance needs to be brought from the fringe to the forefront.

Compliance operations are critical to running a business today, especially with increasing regulations and scrutiny. Organizations must operate within legal and ethical boundaries, mitigate risks, and safeguard their reputations.

The regulations exist for a reason – they help ensure that organizations operate in a legal and compliant manner. They also protect the stakeholders’ interests and uphold the reputation and integrity of the organizations. If your organization fails to comply, it leads to fines, penalties, and even criminal charges. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced that it filed 760 total enforcement actions in the fiscal year 2022, a whopping 9 percent increase over the previous year.

The compliance landscape is constantly changing and organizations are often challenged to meet the requirements of multiple regulations and frameworks. Keeping up with ever-changing, often overlapping, requirements are a significant burden for most organizations, leading to audit fatigue and frustration for everyone involved.

As we enter 2023, we are still grappling with a slew of pandemic-related challenges in addition to the looming recession, talent shortage, and physical and mental health problems. Issues like inflation, shifting consumer and societal norms, and global geopolitical turmoil are adding to the increasing pressure on organizations.

The standard information security management system helps organizations with manifold benefits like complying with the data privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act and EU General Data Protection Regulation. But who should be SIO 27001 compliant, and can you become ISO 27001 compliant?

With the chaos and uncertainty brimming, organizations are facing risks at each step. From reduced employee productivity to third-party mismanagement to data theft, compliance risk along with technological risk factors, organizations are having a difficult time navigating through these challenges. Operational risk management is the need of the hour to help organizations to stay on track and increase their operational efficiency while staying compliant.

COSO framework (The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) is an integral name in the world of risk management. With the explosion of cyber threats, and exponentially increasing uncertainty from multiple aspects, organizations were in dire need of an integrated risk management framework that could navigate them through the intricacies and uncertainties and that’s how COSO has come into existence.

Since 2009, financial services’ compliance functions have undergone drastic changes and modifications and the pandemic only elevated them further. Banking institutions are now looking for a more efficient and streamlined compliance model to actively define and shape the firm’s next strategy and operational excellence. 

Are you still using spreadsheets for risk assessment, managing compliance, compliance audits, and tracking incidents? Probably, it’s time to switch to a GRC tool that can help you streamline compliance processes and support your compliance framework, risk management, analyze the gaps for corrective action plans, automate follow-ups and reporting, and do much more

Running a successful company itself is a tedious task. Following all the parameters, abiding by all the norms, and getting prepped for the new security guidelines takes an enormous amount of effort and time. But even after following every step by the book, an enterprise organization gets asked by clients from time to time ‘are they secured enough?’. 

Do you want to enhance organization efficiency, reduce risks, and enact a unified governance policy? An effective GRC program is the answer.

For any organization to manage its business operations effectively, Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) is a core framework that must be followed to manage its business activities, including IT operations that comply with regulatory requirements. The GRC strategy is an essential part of any business or organization. 

Business involves managing all internal and external factors that may hinder success. Chief compliance must dodge obstacles constantly in their business to complete every task. Prioritizing tasks can be challenging at times.

Along with process completion, new assets, user, employee, and process integration are unavoidable risks following each change.

Compliance management has drastically evolved in the past few years. And while companies don’t often feel it, these positive changes are helping hundreds of thousands of companies, and their executive teams grow consistently and avoid financial disasters that could cause significant problems within their organizations. 

As an organization that operates within the United States, it is crucial to adhere to a wide range of regulatory requirements. Imagine this. You’re a U.S.-based non-profit that has to adhere to a minimum of 50 Federal, state-specific, and local regulations to keep receiving the grants. Right from the FDA and IRS to DOJ Federal laws, there are several other state-specific rules that you need to comply with. Monitoring and tracking the regulator compliance requirements are time-consuming. Doing it manually makes it even more cumbersome. 

Since the beginning of business whether they knew it or not organizations have always been analyzing risk and implementing mitigation procedures. It wasn’t until 2002 when Michael Rasmussen and OCEG finally defined the field of risk management and coined the term GRC (governance, risk, and compliance). The concept was revolutionary, in a time when the world of business was becoming ever-more complex the field of thought known as GRC outlined and defined the interconnectivity of common areas of risk and established methods of prevention.

Information security is not getting easier. Organization, technology, and data complexity has grown exponentially, and an adequate and effective IT security policy requires constant tracking and managing. Organizations are in a constant state of flux and change, and IT is in no way immune to this change. As the organization evolves, the underlying IT infrastructure is in a constant need to be stitched up and monitored.

Governance, risk, and compliance is a hot topic amongst organizations of all sizes. GRC principles are essential in developing sustainable operations in the uncertainty of the future. Each of these is a separate pillar of an organizational structure, but each relies on the other to maintain the integrity of the organization. Governance seeks to maintain strong, responsible, and diligent leadership. Risk management is the identification, preparedness, and mitigation of threatening uncertainties. And compliance ensures that the organization upholds the law and operates with integrity. Each of these helps build the foundation for the organization to move forward in a responsible and sustainable manner.

In today’s modern world, it is becoming increasingly necessary for even non-profit organizations to stay on top of constant change and the ever-growing list of demanding regulations. Our current modern environment has grown into an increasingly complex and interconnected web of third-party relationships, distributed operations, global supply chains, compliance requirements etc. This puts a unique and intense pressure on compliance professionals within non-profit organizations world-wide as they must take responsibility to build controls and procedures that establish an authentically ethical organization that acts with integrity in such a dynamic environment. As non-profit organizations are exempt from federal and state taxes and have unique access to certain types of public funding, they consequently hold themselves accountable to the highest standards of ethical and compliance practices.

Having a board-level compliance committee is now a standard in most organizations. Based on the regulation framework, processes, and internal structure, the role of these entities differs.

With ever-evolving regulatory landscapes and frameworks, staying compliant is more of an ongoing effort today. Compliance programs keep an organization abreast with the changing regulations so as to avoid any legal implications. Therein lies the need, but compliance is a lot more than just following regulation and minimizing corporate misconduct. The very fabric of a compliance program is woven into daily business operations. It lays down principles and ethical standards, which influence the organization’s policies and continues in a loop, affecting risk management, oversight, monitoring, and corrective action.

Over the years, technology has become a critical part of the compliance ecosystem. AI and machine learning have redefined the approach and made it more efficient.
Through this blog post, you will see the benefits of compliance technology and how to choose the best technology for compliance management.

According to an analysis by Atlas VPN, credit card fraud cases surged by 104.7% when you compare Q1 of 2019 and 2020. Likewise, Julie Conroy, a research director at Aite Group, reported that by the end-2020, credit card fraud losses in the US amounted to a staggering $11 billion! These facts make it clear that the digital payment ecosystem is rife with vulnerabilities. After all, security gaps can emerge at various points of handling, storage, and transmission, such as at POS devices, e-commerce apps, Wi-Fi hotspots and personal computers.

In a world where efficiency is king, it comes as no surprise that the practice of workflow automation is as popular as it is. Every process has some form of workflow to go through, and these often include several manual tasks, which increase risk exposure due to their inherently error-prone nature. Workflow automation addresses this lack, working on a company-wide scale. For instance, as per data published by the Annuitas Group, marketing and process automation drew in a 417 % increase in revenue.

We know that good governance is the culmination of robust internal controls. Risk management specialists and compliance officers always speak about implementing internal controls. What exactly is the definition of internal controls? The federal security law, Section 13(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 provides a clear definition of internal controls interns of accounting and bookkeeping:

The year 2021 ushers in a new decade of business change, especially considering the roller-coaster that 2020 was. As organizations move forward, there are various compliance challenges both new and old that compliance officers must come to terms with. Compliance refers to playing according to the rule book, so amid geo-political changes, data privacy concerns, questions on operational resilience, and cybercrime threats, there is new interest in policy and regulatory mandates.

Good governance is essential for every organization. And government agencies are no exception to this. Government, regulatory agencies, and public sector companies need to comply with a myriad of regulations. Regulatory compliance comprises the rules and regulations connected to business procedures. When regulatory compliance is disregarded, then it can lead to a lawful penalty and damage in reputation. Some rules and regulations that government agencies must comply with include the Dodd-Frank-Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS),Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Frameworks such as COBIT and NIST, a compliance standard, inform government bodies how to keep pace with regulations.