With Limited Resources for Compliance Programs, Champions Spread the Word, ‘Issue Spot’

When attorney Matthew Silverman proposed the idea of having compliance ambassadors throughout his company, management said “it’s not the right time”—more than once. But then hints of a compliance problem appeared over a six-month period. “We kept seeing compliance gaps,” said Silverman, senior counsel at Viavi Solutions in Scottsdale, Arizona. He and a colleague had a running joke: “You know what would have fixed this? If we had a champions network. We looked at all the ways the relatively minor gaps and issues could have been prevented by having more awareness and accountability and presence in certain functional groups.” Ultimately, they were a tipping point with management, and that’s how Silverman got a compliance champions network, he said at the Compliance & Ethics Institute sponsored by Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics Sept. 22.[1] “That put us over the top,” he explained.

With compliance programs bumping up against resource limits, compliance champions, also known as ambassadors, are an affordable way to spread the compliance message and feed compliance intelligence from departments back to the mothership, but not as spies or police, Silverman explained. “How can you use people in your organization who are not full-time compliance professionals? These are people devoting a small portion of their time to compliance,” he said. “They’re the eyes and ears.”

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