The Easiest Way to ‘Tone at the Top’

I  love this article by Tom Fox for Compliance Week. In the piece he states that ‘Tone at the Top’, while effective, is one of the most clichéd terms in compliance today.

I don’t think the phrase is cliché, and even if it is, it’s an effective rule. By now we all know that for compliance to be fully integrated into an organization, it has to be important to executives and top-level staff who echo this message throughout the company - this is easier said than done at most organizations. While ‘toning at the top’ can go a long way to ensuring your business travelers are fully compliant with the FCPA, there is another easier way to get this done.

The easiest way to ‘tone at the top’ in your own organization is to employ the use of an automated expense monitoring technology. Leveraging technology makes “toning at the top” easier in two ways:

1)   By using a technology to analyze all of your employee’s transactions, your business is (literally) “putting its money where its mouth is.” It communicates to staff that a)they’re being watched and b)that being compliant is so important to your business that you’re willing to pay for the tools to get the job done properly.

2)   Using technology turns compliance from a wish into a reality, because you’re making it easy to see exactly who is spending what and when. It’s easy for some expenditures to ‘fall through the cracks’ when doing manual reviews. Using a technology such as Oversight Insights On Demand says that you’re monitoring for compliance – 100% of the time.

Of course, in our ideal, fully compliant world ‘tone at the top’ goes hand in hand with an expense audit solution like Oversight. You really can’t have one without the other, but using technology certainly making ‘toning at the top’ much easier for organizations looking to shore up their compliance efforts.