Four Ways to Improve Antitrust Compliance Programs
By Devin Ballam, Marketing –
While antitrust and anti-corruption compliance programs each serve to improve a company’s integrity, the government provides benefits to companies with an effective corruption compliance program, but not for companies that have antitrust programs.
Each of the two compliance programs have guidelines that must be followed in order to ensure the company’s compliance. These set guidelines act as a form of prevention and detection to help minimize unlawful business practices.
The government leaders who enforce these policies make assumptions when reviewing companies who have violated the antitrust law. They assume that if a company has violated the law, it was due to their weak implementation of an effective compliance and ethics program. However, this is not the case, as a company may have an effective program in place, but still be susceptible to corrupt practices like bribery.
The Four Steps to Improvement
Four steps in particular can help a company improve its antitrust compliance programs. First, a company must implement a culture of integrity and ethics. Senior managers know they are not allowed to collude with other companies to beat out the competition, and yet many managers continue to participate in such activities. A culture that does not tolerate such activities will reduce this type of violations.
Second, companies should increase their CCO’s responsibility for antitrust compliance. Too often, CCOs have little responsibility because they are under the impression that antitrust is a “lawyer’s world”, and therefore they should not be involved. This could not be further from the truth. CCOs need to work with lawyers to help ensure the company is compliant in all aspects.
Third, it’s important to enhance controls and conduct audits. CCOs need to know how to set, modify and enhance controls as they see fit. Then, they need to run audits to ensure the employees are following these rules.
Fourth, upper management must emphasize antitrust training. Companies spend more energy focusing on anti-corruption compliance than on antitrust. Both require large amounts of attention. Only when a company decides to devote resources to training its employees will it see a reduction in infractions.
New Technology Now Available
Sometimes these four things may not be enough, and the situation calls for greater assistance. EyeDetect™ is a new technology that can detect violations in antitrust laws by conducting a simple test. With the use of this technology, lie detection is much more efficient as violations can be detected based on a completely unbiased mathematical data generated from the involuntary behavior of a person’s eyes. The human eye reflects signs of stress and deception, and with technology like EyeDetect, detection is 85 percent accurate. By using EyeDetect to screen employees, companies can reduce the risk of violating anti-compliance measures, increase their productivity, and increase their profits.