You don’t have to go through infinite hoops to attain regulatory compliance. Regulatory compliance can provide various benefits to businesses by making it easier to comply with the appropriate laws, rules, and industry standards. The specific compliance standards vary by industry and country. However, in countries with a strong business and economic landscape, establishing regulatory compliance is a must for every sector and firm.

Regulatory compliance is especially crucial in businesses with strict compliance requirements, such as financial services and healthcare, as well as areas where data protection, cybersecurity, and customer privacy are critical to company continuity and legally compliant operations.

In recent years, noncompliance has had an impact on a wide range of businesses, including oil and gas corporations (BP) and manufacturing plants (Republic Steel), telecommunications companies (WorldCom), banks (JP Morgan Chase), and consulting firms (Arthur Andersen).

An organization that achieves regulatory compliance can credibly inform its stakeholders that it has met particular requirements and been certified by an industry-accepted regulatory agency. By adhering to the laws and regulations that apply to its business operations, it can demonstrate its integrity, dependability, and ethics, all of which can increase stakeholder trust and boost its competitive position.

Benefits of Regulatory Compliance

Maintaining compliance helps your company mitigate risks like security breaches and data losses, as well as avoid disciplinary action that could lead to license revocations, damaged reputations, lost customers, and financial penalties and losses.

A few specific benefits include:

• Keeping up with a constantly changing regulatory environment: Perfect compliance may feel like a far-off dream for companies struggling to continuously adapt and update their regulations in order to meet federal, industry, and state standards. A GRC platform with compliance programs can help you to more efficiently anticipate these sudden curves in the road.
• Protecting your business’s resources and reputation: Noncompliance can result in massive reputational losses and broken trust with your customer base. Worse, you can have your license revoked, impacting your ability to meet business objectives and goals. By maintaining regulatory compliance, you mitigate these risks and help to keep daily operations running smooth.
• Protecting you from cybersecurity threats: Cybersecurity compliance helps your company to mitigate the risk of data breaches and malware attacks internally and externally. By maintaining this type of compliance, you protect the data privacy of your company, your employees, and your customers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) creates many of the cybersecurity regulatory compliance standards for US companies if you’re looking for a good place to start improving your cybersecurity compliance.
• Improving efficiency: Many regulatory compliance protocols require structured data storage, streamlined business processes, and regular reports on business functions. All of these work to improve your company’s efficiency over time, helping to reduce your costs.

What Does Regulatory Compliance Mean?

Regulatory compliance means an organization is aware of and aligned with all the laws and regulations relevant to its business and industry. These regulations may be set at the local, state, federal, or international levels.

Regulatory compliance differs from corporate compliance, which is about following internal policies and rules to achieve some self-set goals and objectives. However, both types of compliance are essential since they can drive the organization’s strategic direction, determine its ethical framework, and ensure accountability and transparency.

What is Regulation?

A regulation is a law enacted by a governmental body granting a regulatory agency enforcement authority. One of the most well-known regulations in the United States is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). SOX established stringent rules for U.S. public companies to document financial compliance and corporate disclosures. Its goal is to prevent financial fraud and protect investors and the public.

SOX also granted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement authority and created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to oversee audit rules.

Another regulation, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), regulated the protection of patient information, specifically electronic protected health information (ePHI), and granted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) oversight authority to enforce compliance.

Some other examples of regulatory compliance regulations relevant in the U.S. business landscape include:

• Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH)
• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation of 2016 (GDPR)

What Does Regulate Mean?

While “government regulation” refers to the law, “regulate” means controlling or supervising using rules and regulations. Thus, legislative and executive branches establish the laws, but government agencies enforce these laws, ensure compliance, and track noncompliance.

What is a Regulator?

Agencies act as regulators for their industries by creating guidelines and frameworks to help organizations successfully meet compliance requirements. For example, the HHS offers HIPAA guidance materials outlining the HIPAA regulations and suggested safeguards to help covered entities (e.g hospitals) implement HIPAA.

Similarly, the SEC provides links to materials that outline the steps to SOX Section 404 compliance for small businesses.

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The term “regulator” also acts as a shorthand for external auditors engaged by a regulatory agency to verify a company’s regulatory compliance posture.

Why Regulatory Compliance Is an Important Part of Business

Financial Health

Any compliance officer will tell you that financial safety is the first benefit associated with regulatory compliance. Regulatory noncompliance can result in steep penalties for the errant organization. This is what happened in 2020 to Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan Chase, who ended up paying fines of $7.50 billion out of a total of $11.39 billion imposed on all U.S. banks during the year.

Protection from Lawsuits

In addition to avoiding financial penalties, complying with laws and regulations protects organizations from lawsuits-whether brought by the agency or someone else (e.g., the public). For example, in 2019, between 2011 and 2019, 142 local governments filed lawsuits against businesses for noncompliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Business Continuity and Competitiveness

Regulatory compliance provides numerous guideposts that show businesses what is required to succeed in their industry. Compliance laws also evolved to help create uniformity in the marketplace and enable companies to compete fairly, ethically, and on equal footing. Companies that achieve regulatory compliance may achieve a good position in their industry.

Maintain a Solid Reputation

Companies that comply with regulations and laws offer consumers a sense of security. In return, they trust such companies with their data, money, and loyalty.

Protection from Cybercrime

Higher-risk industries like healthcare and financial institutions recognize the value of the information they collect and acknowledge that they are attractive targets to malicious actors.

However, other industries sometimes feel that they are not as likely to be attacked. This mistaken assumption often leads to limited regulatory compliance focus and diminished security, increasing the likelihood of cyberattacks and data breaches.

Data breaches decrease customer retention, which can have a catastrophic financial impact on the company, and even lead to bankruptcy and closure. Regulatory compliance provides added information security by requiring organizations to adhere to rules that can protect their assets from threat actors and acts as one of many safeguards to ensure data protection.

Increased Profitability

Regulatory compliance and the audit reports proving compliance allow companies to market themselves better. SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports help clients trust their vendors and demonstrate ongoing SOX compliance. Without these reports, the business might lose customers and thus take a hit to its profitability.

How to Ensure Product Safety?

Product safety is an important component of plant operations since it impacts your company’s reputation, profitability, and regulatory compliance. Consumers expect high-quality items that satisfy their requirements and expectations, and any flaw or contamination might have catastrophic implications. In this post, you will learn how to assure product safety for consumers, from design to distribution.

Design for safety

The first step toward ensuring product safety is to design items with safety in mind. This entails thinking about the potential hazards, risks, and laws that pertain to your product category and implementing features and standards that prevent or mitigate them. For example, you may utilize materials that are long-lasting, non-toxic, and biodegradable, or you could design your product to be simple to use, clean, and maintain. You can also conduct testing and trials to ensure the safety and performance of your product before releasing it to the market.

Implement quality control

The second step to ensure product safety is to implement quality control measures throughout your production process. Quality control involves inspecting, testing, and monitoring your raw materials, equipment, and finished products to ensure they meet your quality standards and specifications. You may use various tools and methods, such as checklists, sampling, audits, or statistical process control, to identify and correct any defects or deviations. You may also train your staff to follow quality procedures and protocols and document your quality records and reports.

Follow good manufacturing practices

The third step to ensure product safety is to follow good manufacturing practices (GMP) in your plant. GMP are guidelines and principles that ensure your products are consistently produced and controlled according to the quality standards and regulations of your industry. GMP cover various aspects of your plant operations, such as hygiene, sanitation, maintenance, calibration, validation, traceability, and recall. By following GMP, you can prevent or reduce the risk of contamination, errors, or accidents that may compromise your product safety.

Apply hazard analysis and critical control points

The fourth step to ensure product safety is to apply hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) in your plant. HACCP is a systematic approach that identifies, evaluates, and controls the hazards that may affect your product safety, such as biological, chemical, or physical hazards. HACCP involves seven steps: conducting a hazard analysis, determining the critical control points, establishing critical limits, monitoring the critical control points, taking corrective actions, verifying the effectiveness of the system, and keeping records. HACCP can help you prevent or eliminate the hazards before they cause harm to your consumers.

Conduct product testing and certification

The fifth step to ensure product safety is to conduct product testing and certification before releasing your products to the market. Product testing and certification are processes that verify that your products meet the safety and quality requirements and standards of your industry, customers, or regulators. You may use internal or external laboratories, agencies, or organizations to perform the testing and certification, depending on the type and scope of your product. Product testing and certification can provide you with evidence and assurance of your product safety, as well as enhance your credibility and trustworthiness.

Manage product distribution and storage

The sixth and final step to ensure product safety is to manage your product distribution and storage properly. Product distribution and storage are the stages where your products are transported, handled, and stored until they reach your customers. You need to ensure that your products are protected from damage, theft, or spoilage during these stages and that they are delivered in a timely and efficient manner. You may use appropriate packaging, labeling, tracking, and inventory systems to ensure your product’s safety and quality during distribution and storage.

Bottom Line

Developing a strong business compliance management system necessitates doing a thorough risk assessment and setting the tolerance for each. If a threat is unlikely to affect the company and the expense of mitigating the potential hazard is too expensive, accepting the risk may be part of the compliance risk management process.

For example, a sole owner who handles small amounts of personal client information may decide not to use end-to-end data encryption solutions. This decision may seem logical if the data can cause limited damage and no one is transferring it between machines. They may, however, acquire firewall protection to protect their machine from potential threats.

However, if the same business owner then employs an employee who has access to the data, the chance of data loss (whether unintentional or deliberate) increases. So they must examine the possible harm to customer data and decide whether to invest in end-to-end encryption.

Larger firms have a harder time negotiating compliance laws. They frequently hire a compliance consultant to assess the proper risk profile or set up an in-house compliance department to achieve and sustain regulatory compliance.