According to many business leaders, regulatory compliance is an additional cost to their operations. This idea is accurate because businesses today must comply with one or more sets of regulations, and each one has an accompanying cost. In addition, most companies must comply with more regulations than other organizations. The main reason they do so is to protect their brand and customers.
Compliance Risk
In today’s business environment, business owners cannot afford to make compliance an afterthought. Failure to comply can expose a company to various complications. They may even face monetary fines and legal penalties, damaging their reputation in the process. Likewise, non-compliance can lead to material loss.
Compliance involves prescribed best practices, industry regulations, or government laws. The rules cover all types of organizations: federal, state, nonprofit, for-profit, private, and public businesses. Compliance risks are more critical in healthcare organizations, financial institutions, insurance companies, and businesses handling credit card payments. That said, you should know the specific administrative bodies covering your industry to avoid compliance risks. Further, you should also be familiar with the national and state standards.
Compliance Risk is a Business Threat
You should not think that compliance is something you can do later. Again, you can face penalties and considerable fines. So, you need to do it now because the failure to do so puts your business at risk. It is your professional obligation, after all. One of the reasons some companies are hesitant to comply is the complex nature of regulatory compliance. However, using the services of a compliance management platform provider, like anecdotes.ai can make the process simpler.
Various business concerns involving non-compliance
You can streamline your business operations when you follow compliance regulations. If you do not know what your business can face from failure to comply, we’ve listed them down below:
Liability and Legal Concerns
If you fail to comply or are negligent, your business can face legal troubles. Compliance can help you avoid many legal issues. It could prevent the payment of heavy legal fees, lawsuits, work stoppages, or business shutdowns.
Data Security
Often, regulatory compliance is the tool to help you protect your customers and your business. The regulations enable you to standardize your business operations. GDPR, HIPAA, PCI are only a few regulatory bodies that keep track of all the risks that might affect consumer information. If your business is compliant, you are implementing the most current protective measures against threats to data security.
Business Reputation
Threats to data security are always present. Companies, large and small, should take these threats seriously. You already know that data breaches are costly. Colonial Pipeline, Facebook, Panasonic, GoDaddy, and T-Mobile are a few organizations that had data breaches in 2021. But as they complied with business regulations, their reputation remained intact, even if there were legal issues they needed to settle. They were able to prevent further damages through their automatic systems that sent out early warnings about the breach.
As pointed out, you should start regulatory compliance immediately. It is a necessary business expense. Create a team to manage your compliance efforts. Further, make the compliance process more manageable by working with a provider of a robust compliance platform that will automatically guide you on what to do.
