Assessments

Building upon a foundation of ethics, many companies choose to include certain areas of compliance training and awareness in their ethics and business conduct programs. First, your company should conduct a comprehensive risk assessment by looking closely at your particular business to determine areas of business and legal risk. Identified risk areas may call for training for all employees or for select groups of employees in specific risk areas.

Some risk areas may include:

• Anti-Kickback/ AntiBribery
  
• Antitrust
  
• Courtesies/ Gratuities
  
• Company Assets
  
• Conflicts of Interest
  
• Cost Accounting
  
• Environmental
  
• Export Control
  
• Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

• Government Contracting Issues
  
• Procurement Integrity/ TINABusiness
  
• Security/ Proprietary Information
  
• Safety Rules/ OSHA
  
• Safety Rules/OSHA
  
• Time Charging
  
• Non-Harassment
  
• Non-Discrimination/ EEO/ Foreign
  
• Affirmative Action
  

Your compliance program should be distinguished from your ethics and business conduct program, as a compliance program  is a rule-based system designed to mitigate risk to the business enterprise and an ethics and business conduct program is a values-based system designed to help employees guide their conduct in the absence of clear rules (the gray areas).

Compliance programs establish minimum acceptable conduct, whereas strong ethics and business conduct programs are the foundation upon which 
compliance programs and legal best practices are built. Compliance rules tend to cluster in discrete subject areas, and some areas may only concern a specific, targeted group of employees (e.g. export control issues, Truth In Negotiations (TINA), etc.). Your compliance program may be integrated into your ethics and business conduct program, resulting in a cohesive whole. However, it is important to distinguish compliance, which  is rules-based, from ethics, which is values- based.