As a businessperson, it’s crucial that you are proactive about regulatory compliance relevant to your operations. For one thing, meeting regulatory compliance is vital measure to ensure data privacy for you and your customers. For another, it helps avoid additional costs associated with non-compliance such as fines, forced compliance costs, and lost business.

However, compliance isn’t a walk in the park, it requires money, time and regulations keeps changing and varying across different regions. To avoid corporate investigation due to compliance issues, here are some considerations to take into account.

1. Keep up with Regulatory Changes

In today’s era, regulatory developments are dynamic. They change daily thus, small and large businesses often find it difficult to stay informed and keep on top of regulatory changes. Here are some effective techniques to help you with that.

  • Stay up to date with regulatory changes by keeping good relations with law firms and practitioners in that field. Subscribe on their newsletters to easily get notified on regulatory updates.
  • Check websites of governing and regulatory agencies to get firsthand comprehensive information and understanding of the legislative updates.
  • In addition to website, you can also get more information from most regulatory agencies social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedln.
  • Attending online conferences, webinars and events offers you a great platform to learn best practices on implementing regulatory changes.
  • During business meetings, especially formal meetings, be sure to include your legal and regulatory compliance team, who can help itemize and document critical compliance needs.

2. Corporate monitoring is a key step towards regulatory compliance.

Once you become aware a regulatory development, next thing is to hire a professional and independent audit company to conduct an internal review to assess your compliance level. The auditor will look for gaps in existing regulations and advise on best adjustments to meet new requirements.

As a proactive regulatory compliance strategy, internal process audits are critical and should be conducted regularly. Doing so, an organization is able to identify potential pitfalls and/or adjust to meet the upcoming changes in regulatory system.

3. Compliance management software can streamline your compliance process effectively.

A compliance software will not only streamline, but automate and centralize your compliances related process. Such a tool can help you keep on top of best practices for any regulatory changes, improving your cyber security systems. Before, checklists was the most common tool used to monitor compliance. It’s a static tool that don’t offer much information and only useful when the compliance list is being checked.

Automated compliance management software monitor compliance in real-time, giving you current updates and ensure your organization is operating within expected regulations and standards.

4. Develop a dedicated team to keep track of regulatory changes

Without a passionate and knowledgeable team coping with dynamic regulatory changes can be a hard ball. And that can lead to a number of breaches causing your business money and reputation. The team allows the rest of the organization to focus on other issues while they do the heavy lifting of ensuring regulatory compliance.

For small or mid-sized organizations, building a compliance team may not be financially feasible, but most large organizations hire a compliance officer who keeps the organization informed on all matters compliance.

All of this is necessary when there are changes to regulations. Because you have a centralized data storage, accessing the information you need to adjust or adapt your current compliance with the new regulations and practices. In addition, it becomes easy to schedule new compliance tasks, change techniques with time, assign new locations, and generate comprehensive reports for new regulations.