I have a pet peeve. Over my 35 year career I’ve seen some brilliant decisions and I’ve seen some, well, not so brilliant ones. Human nature sometimes tempts us to do the bare minimum to get by. In other words, good enough is good enough.

So what’s my pet peeve? I have done a great deal of work in corporate compliance.

An effective corporate compliance and ethics program is essential for virtually all U.S. businesses in today’s regulatory environment.  Essentially, a compliance and ethics program is a set of protocols a company puts in place to prevent and deter unlawful conduct and to promote a culture of compliance.

Corporate compliance has been in the spotlight much more in recent years. The enormous corporate failures spawned the Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002.  Regulations such as HIPAA, Dodd-Frank and the stock exchanges have caused compliance departments to build and scurry.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are the accounting standards used in the US, while the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are the accounting standards used in over 110 countries around the world. GAAP is considered a more “rules based” system of accounting, while IFRS is more “principles based". Originally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was looking to switch to IFRS by 2015. It now seems that this conversion deadline has been pushed out many years.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“Act”) was passed in response to some very unfortunate financial disasters in the stock market. Enron, WorldCom and Tyco were the poster children for the lack of internal controls over financial reporting. The accounting industry was self-regulated with little governmental oversight.

Are you taking advantage of very affordable analytical tools that can have a real and positive impact on your earnings and controls? Data analytics and continuous monitoring technologies can identify errors, fraud and inefficiencies by independently validating entire populations of transactions against specified control parameters and business rules.