Manatt’s Jacqueline Wolff, co-chair of the firm’s corporate investigations and white collar defense practice, was interviewed for The Anti-Corruption Report’s final installment of a four-part series on measuring corporate compliance. The fourth piece discussed continuously monitoring compliance measurement through gathering and analyzing data.
Figuring out the logistics of data collection and analysis is just as important as knowing what data to collect in the first place, the publication explained. One important step in the process is deciding who should analyze the data once it has been collected.
Wolff recommends that once a company is ready to move the analytics in-house, it should assign the task to someone who is familiar with the company yet separate and apart from the legal function. “Someone like that will be able to look at any recurring issues coming in through the hotline and tie them to a weak spot in the company’s training program,” she said.
Companies also need to determine what type of analysis to perform. Wolff explained that examining patterns over time, and data from different parts of a compliance program, is important.
“Often the data will reveal weaknesses in a compliance program that would be difficult to see when just looking at individual incidents in isolation,” said Wolff. “It’s also important to review data relating to different elements of a compliance program in context with one another.”
Finally, the publication emphasized that measuring compliance is an evolving process and that collecting data about a compliance program’s effectiveness should be put to use in order to improve.
“Once a company has collected data reflecting a weakness in its program, it must adjust its compliance program accordingly,” Wolff said. “Collecting data and not doing anything with it is probably worse than not collecting data at all.”