Compliance Monitoring Meaning

Compliance Monitoring Meaning. The Expectation of Monitoring – But A Lack of GuidanceMonitoring and AuditingA Framework For MonitoringPutting It All TogetherOther Monitoring TechniquesConclusionMonitoring has become a basic expectation of ethics and compliance management The US Sentencing Guidelinesinclude ‘monitoring and auditing’ among the principal components of a recommended compliance and ethics program The Guidelines state “The organization shall take reasonable stepsto ensure that the organization’s compliance and ethics program is followed including monitoring and auditing to detect criminal conduct” The Guidelines continue “The organization shall take reasonable stepsto ensure that the organization’s compliance and ethics program is followed including monitoring and auditing to detect criminal conduct” including “monitoring through regular ‘walkarounds’ or continuous observation while managing the organization” Want to know more about compliance monitoring? Browse CCI’s compliance monitoring library Along with the Guidelines other ethics and compliance management frameworks include ‘monitoring’ The US Department of Health and Human Services’ mod Because of the confusion between monitoring and auditing it is helpful to distinguish between the two Monitoring tends to occur within the activity’s operational structure and closer to the underlying activity’s occurrence It may be conducted by operational management or involve an expert outside of the operational line where the expertise does not exist within the management structure Auditing generally describes activities that occur further after the fact by parties more independent of the respective operational management such as an internal audit staffer or external auditors While auditing may occur far after the fact to allow for the problem to be corrected it may do better at ensuring that operational management effectively manages the business activity Monitoring allows for early identification and correction before a problem festers and causes the company to be in noncompliance Examples of Monitoring Monitoring and auditing are essential to verify that a business The US securities industry has developed a helpful framework that includes monitoring FINRA the financial regulatory authority requires all of its member firms to maintain written supervisory procedures (WSPs) to ensure that business activities are regularly monitored for compliance with exchange rules These WSPs are completed by supervisors often with advanced supervisory credentials In addition firms also must maintain supervisory control procedures (SCPs) that document how the WSPs will be reviewed and/or verified This industry’s approach essentially establishes secondary and tertiary means to control and manage business activity Slowly other industries are building approaches similar to the securities industry that ensure that a business process is checked and doublechecked to identify assess and respond to errors and other variances that would otherwise thwart compliance with an activity’s procedures The following is an overall approach toward understanding what Given all of this information the challenge then is for management to implement monitoring steps that best meet an activity’s needs The intent is to develop implement maintain and improve monitoring practices so that they provide effective oversight of an activity as efficiently as possible For starters a process may not need a sophisticated monitoring plan at the beginning it likely can start with basic monitoring steps as the process gets underway In fact a new process may be best served by very basic but active monitoring in the early stages to ensure that the basic process steps are followed and to identify glaring variations Management also can simplify development of monitoring steps by using standardized templates and other materials that can then be customized to a process to train employees serve as reporting tools and invoke correction actions Some ways that monitoring may be modified include the following SelfMonitoring This is a means by which a responsible individual or group – such as operations staff – monitors and reports on its own performance Selfmonitoring seeks to create greater accountability among the responsible parties and in turn reduce the need for monitoring by others like management Auditing can be used as a check to ensure that the selfmonitoring actions are performed as expected and not otherwise compromised Still even with selfmonitoring it is reasonable that management will want to perform somemonitoring to provide greater assurance that the selfmonitoring efforts are working or for highrisk activities Continuous Monitoring This is a means by which monitoring is made an ongoing activity versus a periodic discrete one According to KPMG (PDF download) “Continuous monitoring (CM) is a feedback mechanism used by management to ensure that controls operate as designed and transactions a Next to the existence of a regimented process itself monitoring is perhaps the best tool to ensure that an activity meets its objectives So it is wise to use monitoring to a process’s strategic advantage In this regard it is important to adjust monitoring steps as the process evolves and apply riskbased methodology to monitoring so that it is both efficient and effective and does not lead to ‘overkill’ In short ensure that monitoring remains as dynamic to the process itself to get the greatest value from it Editor’s Note This is the seventh post in an ongoing series on Codes of Conduct by Jason Lunday Follow this linkto view all of Mr Lunday’s articles in his Codes of Conduct featured column series Author Jason Lunday.

Government compliance monitoring will find vulnerabilities and mistakes in the ways employees and officials handle data Since government data is usually stored across several legacy systems monitoring is done manually and automatically to find instances where threat actors can obtain unauthorized access.

What is compliance monitoring, and do you need a plan?

Compliance monitoring refers to the quality assurance tests organizations do to check how well their business operations meet their regulatory and internal process obligations This need to monitor compliance performance is often a regulatory requirement regulators like the UK&#39s Financial Conduct Authority require any firms applying for approval to operate to detail their compliance monitoring plans for instance.

GUIDANCE NOTE: COMPLIANCE MONITORING

The Guiding Principles of Corporate ComplianceHow Do You Ensure Compliance with Policies and Procedures?Auditing Internal ProcessesProving Compliance with RegulationsOperational Review CyclesPolicy and Procedures Review CyclesPolicy and Compliance Management SoftwareEach of the policies within the compliance program should describe the general guiding principles and detail the importance of the rules Procedures should list out the steps and methods a person should perform to achieve the desired outcome Organizations that don&#39t create their compliance program or provide the necessary training especially on federallymandated regulations like HIPAA or best practices for patient care can see a myriad of federal fines expensive lawsuits droppage from Medicare and Medicaid coverage and even the loss of their accreditation and liability insurance To protect itself a healthcare facility or hospital should have a compliance policy that contains hundreds of individual policies procedures and rules that dictate how employees should function provide care and meet mandated standards Healthcare compliance should cover numerous functions and areas including patient care patient privacy and HIPAA cybersecurity billing and reimbursement medi The best way to ensure your staff is complying with these policies and procedures is through compliance monitoring systems Monitoring – and auditing – compliance can help a healthcare organization ensure they are following the program&#39s various policies and procedures Depending on the size of the organization there could be a single person responsible for compliance in a small medical practice or a full compliance team or department for a large hospital network Although the OIG didn&#39t differentiate between monitoring and auditing in its original 1998 document there is a difference between the two As we said above monitoring is an internal process performed by the chief compliance officer and the corporate compliance committee Auditing on the other hand is performed by an independent third party such as an accreditation agency The Joint Commission and the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) are just two of several accrediting agencies that can audit a hospital&#39s internal processes (In the corporate world corporations will often hire independent firms to perform their audits before their errors and misdeeds are found by groups like FINRA or the Federal Trade Commission) Since this is part of the healthcare accreditation requirement representatives from the accrediting agency will descend on the organization (often unannounced) look over their policies and procedures manual supervise doctors and nurses There are several ways your organization can prove compliance with different regulations For one thing doctors and nurses should be providing thorough documentation for all patient interactions If a test is going to be ordered the documentation should justify it so there aren&#39t any accusations of financial fraud For another because HIPAA is so important it&#39s critical to prove HIPAA compliance You can do that with the right software like MedTrainer or Jotform conduct selfassessments and document all necessary reports or request a thirdparty audit from an outside auditor Meanwhile corporate compliance software like CyberOne and MetricStream can help corporations with compliance issue recognition to identify and eliminate cybersecurity risk issues and even generate compliance scores across different processes and functions Conduct annual policy reviews This means not only reviewing your general policies and procedures but also updating new policies from your accrediti An operational review looks at the actual operation of your organization and its performance The policy manual may drive expected and accepted behavior but the operational review looks at whether those standards are being met The operational review looks at communication issues operational procedures HR issues financial reviews and anything else that can affect the organization&#39s ability to function While this doesn&#39t fall directly under the purview of compliance monitoring many aspects of an employee&#39s duties and functions are affected by the compliance policies An employee&#39s performance may be judged by what&#39s in the policy and procedure manuals These reviews should at least happen during an annual or quarterly review but it would be more helpful if you can create an ongoing measurement campaign to provide regular assessments of a person&#39s performance on their work In manufacturing circles this would be something as simple as measuring the number of units produced du Outdated policies may not comply with new laws and regulations may not include new technology and may miss out on new philosophies and techniques Imagine a corporate IT policy that doesn&#39t address the use of storing documents on cloudbased servers or fails to recognize the use of available biometrics Depending on your organization and the size of your compliance committee you may want to review your policies on an annual basis Of course you don&#39t want to just review the entire manual once a year Break it up into different sections and review one section per month but review that same section at the same time each year You can also review your policies if there is a largescale organizational change changes to existing laws and regulations or if there&#39s an incident or policy violation Policy reviews are more easily managed when you have policy and compliance management software to help you with your monitoring and reviews PowerDMS is a policy and compliance management solution that can help you streamline your policy review process by creating advanced workflows sending out automated reminders to your compliance committee ensuring version control mapping policies to accreditation standards and much more It can be used as training management software which means you can share training content through the solution and track signatures and testing which is also a part of accreditation Software built specifically for compliance monitoring includes solutions like Onspring Donesafe or MasterControl Quality Excellence Of course your compliance management software will depend on your industry and the needs of your organization.