Compliance Regulations and the Ten Commandments
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Professor Steen Thomsen of The Copenhagen Business School said, "We should all be fired!" But that did not happen. Corporate and financial leaders' heads did not roll. Profits were not returned to helpless investors who lost out. But, fair warning: the new compliance requirements include transparency and accountability!
All day we have been hearing about the various aspects of compliance regulations, and I want to suggest that these regulations can be compared to the Ten Commandments. And in the interest of full disclosure, which is one of the compliance regulations we have heard about today.
Probably few of us can easily name all the 10 commandments, and even fewer of us here could remember all the compliance regulations discussed today by …
You shall and you shall not
Probably few of us would be happy in a society that formally rejects any of the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments are a package deal. And equally in the corporate world, compliance regulations are intended to be a complete package. You cannot pick and choose according to independent criteria.
In the bible, the 10 Commandments are not a lifestyle choice. They are a covenant, not a proposal, not a negotiation. They are not the 10 principles, nor the 10 guidelines, nor the 10 reasonably good ideas most of the time except when it's terribly inconvenient. They are COMMANDMENTS. You shall and you shall not is how they are worded. Are not compliance regulations similarly worded?
In the bible, the 10 commandments are presented twice. The original revelation was at Mount Sinai soon after the Exodus from Egypt. This is comparable to the compliance regulations that were in place before the finical bubble burst. But the first hearers of the 10 Commandments were the generation of the Golden Calf, and it is possible to compare them to the speculators who caused the financial bubble to get out of control (Except that in the bible, the first hearers all died off by divine decree.) Moses' audience in the second presentation of the 10 Commandments in the Book of Deuteronomy are the children of the once enslaved Israelites who experienced the Exodus. For 40 years they have been wandering in the desert where they were born, living on nothing but manna and following God around in the form of a pillar of fire and a cloud.
In addressing this multitude, Moses emphasizes that the 10 Commandments - and all of the many other laws revealed at Mt Sinai - constitute a covenant "with us, the living, every one of us who is here today." This is also the message of compliance regulations. They do not say 'whenever you get around to it', they say now! Grammatically and existentially speaking, all of us right now are standing at the threshold of the Promised Land with rules of conduct in hand.
EITHER/OR – blessing or curse, life or death.
Here is the 1st Commandment: 'You shall have no other gods besides me.' 3000 years ago, this had mostly to do with refraining from local paganism. Today this includes refraining from many other isms: consumerism, socialism, conservatism, hooliganism, vegetarianism and so on. Ideologies and other possible sets of regulations may not be worshipped in place of the current compliance regulations.
[Moses warns us, in one of the many disturbing passages of anthropomorphism in the bible, that God 'is an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children' … and down to the 3rd & 4th generation. Perhaps this is just explaining the way the human psyche works in passing neuroses down through families, but there is a very real threat being described here. And the threat precedes the promise of reward by the positive anthropomorphic God who can show kindness for a thousand generations. ]
The demands of the 10 commandments are absolute and unwavering, without loopholes and escape clauses. For example, you simply cannot ever, ever covet your neighbor's ox or donkey (much less steal them). The bible threatens us with divine retribution for our failures, whether we are wise enough to fear retribution or not. So how do we live with ourselves under these conditions without anxiety and without pessimism? You may need coaching and an external compliance consultant, because Moses does not provide an answer in the Book of Deuteronomy. His message, which he has received straight from the horses' mouth, that is, the word of God Almighty, is EITHER/OR – blessing or curse, life or death. My psychological interpretation is this: compliance regulations exist because there are simply too many of our neighbors' desirable oxen and donkeys right under our noses to resist the temptation to covet them.
Big Brother will not look the other way
When it comes to religion, our society has become post-modern, rejecting established standards of the past. In Denmark, as in the rest of the free world, we believe that we are free to choose how much we subscribe to any part of our traditional upbringing, including - if not especially the 10 commandments. As corporate leaders, as captains of industry, as guardians of our stockholders' investments, you must ask yourself, is this post-modern faith valid? I want to suggest, actually to tell you outright, that the answer is NO! We have indeed been given new compliance regulations as we have been given the 10 commandments. And in both instances we have been told clearly of both the carrot and the stick.
After the first set of compliance regulations were ignored or bypassed, the financial bubble burst. In the biblical story, the entire generation of the golden calf died out during 40 years of wandering in the desert because God decided they were unworthy to inherit the Promised Land. But after the bubble burst in modern times, the consequences to leaders and management and employees in the financial sector were minimal. And there is no promise of messianic intervention for sinners.
Big Brother will not look the other way, and the either/or conditions of the 10 Commandments will apply. The way to a safe and secure future in the corporate world has become very fundamentalist. The essence of fundamentalism is the claim that there is only one way. In religion, this is hopefully obviously not true. But in the universe of regulatory compliance, this fundamentalism has become established. You are in compliance or you are not, it's all or nothing and now or never.
Doesn't that make it possible, worthwhile and desirable for each of us to accept the revealed compliance covenant "with all your heart and soul and might", to believe in the goodness of this covenant, and to strive to live accordingly?
Arthur Buchman is a corporate psychologist not a minister or a preacher. However it seems that he gets inspiration on good governance, risk management and compliance from the Old Testament. We have asked him to write a book on Managament by Mythology.
