The term compliance is defined as an audit for monitoring the legal environment of a company, and for advising its board according to the outcome of the monitoring. Compliance is the process of adhering to a set of established guidelines or rules established by external bodies such as government agencies, frameworks or by internal corporate policies.
CopenhagenCompliance® focuses on all Major European and international Compliance, Risk and Governance issues. This is your opportunity to focus on the issues that are important to your organization. Copenhagen Compliance will provide new strategies for handling enterprise Compliance Risk and Governance management, EuroSox, IT security & controls, Best practices, Sarbanes-Oxley, Internal Controls, ethics and integrity, corporate governance, and more.
All business enterprises are encumbered with various risks. One of the latest is methods of reducing risks is thru compliance. Compliance activities can considerably reduce the risk in business activities. Implementing Compliance and Internal Controls strengthens competition and market position. Compliance performance make encounters with stakeholders and other international market players a lot easier.
Compliance activity first appeared in financial institutions and the pharmaceutical industry. They have traditionally understood the importance of ensuring the compliance of their activities with existing law and minimizing the risk of causing disturbances in that area.
The advantages of compliance are now appreciated by more and more world's large production and service companies and the size of compliance services grows.
Other compliance terms include prevention, correction activities, and support for the monitored company during any legal procedures, building of structures and creating of procedures.
Compliance spending after Sarbanes-Oxley implementation is rising at an unsustainable rate. Nevertheless the big question remains, whether the money spent is really reducing the risk of compliance violations. CopenhagenCompliance® will provide the answers.
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"Eurosox Compliance perspectives" |
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An effective compliance program has to be consistent with the size, complexity, range of operation and organization of a company. A one-size-fits-all or a top-down check list approach, that treats all Governance, Risks or Compliance (GRC) issues as being equal, is not a solution. The checklists are designed only to provide indications that a "canaries in a coal mine" does. If your organisation's program for monitoring GRC issues is weak, it generally speaks to the overall control culture and risk management. Therefore weak GRC is a canary that's stopped singing — an indication of potential trouble.
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"Compliance Checklist" |
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NON-COMPLIANCE A GROWING PROBLEM |
Tax authorities meeting in Seoul last month highlighted a "significant and growing problem" of international non-compliance with tax laws, including:
- The use of offshore accounts, trusts and shell companies in offshore financial centres to conceal taxable assets or income. This is normally viewed as unlawful evasion, rather than avoidance
- The creation of shell companies offshore to shift profits abroad. This practice is undertaken by "businesses of all sizes", says the report of the OECD meeting. Many countries have strict anti-avoidance rules that allow governments to tax income held in tax havens, but these are not always effective.
- Some multinationals, including financial institutions, cut their tax bills by using sophisticated cross-border schemes and investment structures. Tax authorities say these schemes involve the misuse of tax treaties. The British government last year banned companies from claiming tax deductions in the UK as well as another country but this kind of "tax arbitrage" between big international economies remains common.
- Artificially shifting income into low tax jurisdictions and expenses into high tax jurisdictions by manipulating "transfer pricing" rules, which are meant to ensure that multinationals charge an "arms-length" price when goods or services are transferred between subsidiaries.
In addition to these perennial techniques, tax planners have devised numerous schemes that exploit anomalies in tax legislation. Large sums can be lost before governments become aware of the schemes and close the loopholes. A directory of aggressive tax planning schemes is being drawn up by OECD countries "to identify trends and measures to counter such schemes".
Source: Financial Times
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