HOW DO YOU KEEP ABREAST OF REGULATIONS?
Corporate regulatory monitoring (see also regulatory monitoring, legal monitoring) is an increasingly important issue these days. Our world is changing fast. Regulations are changing rapidly in different countries, and it's becoming increasingly important to keep abreast of developments.
The terms "legal watch", "regulatory watch" and "legal watch" are relatively similar and are generally used in the same way in everyday language. In reality, there are a few differences. Formally, the term "legal watch" covers monitoring of legislation, i.e. texts that have legal force. Regulatory monitoring is broader, since it also covers regulations, directives and generally guides to good practice. Legal monitoring generally also includes aspects relating to case law.
We will refer here to regulatory monitoring, as this term is commonly used in companies.
What is the purpose of regulatory monitoring?
It ensures regulatory compliance for your organisation and your business. Being compliant from a regulatory point of view helps avoid claims and complaints.
To ensure your company's regulatory protection, you first need to be fully aware of the regulatory requirements, texts, laws and directives that apply to your business. This is the first essential step for today's organisations.
Regulatory monitoring involves consulting a large number of sites, such as the The Federal Council admin.ch - Home page for Switzerland and, where applicable, regional regulations (e.g. Vaud legislative base - VD.CH).
This takes time, which is why it's a good idea to sign up for a regulatory watch service which automatically informs you of any changes concerning your company, your process or your department.
Once you are aware of the regulations that apply to you, the next step is to identify which requirements apply to the organisation, which texts and articles specifically concern your company, and to assess the extent to which the text applies and the extent to which the company is subject to it. Once the texts and articles applicable to the company have been identified, the next step is to assess whether your company complies with these texts.
There are several methodologies for carrying out this conformity assessment. For example, you can base your assessment on the text and then, for each article, assess whether the company or organisation complies with that article. This analysis can be carried out, for example :
- through an audit which may be internal (i.e. carried out, for example, by a pool of internal auditors)
- by calling in an external body to carry out the audit.
- It is also good practice to use checklists. A checklist will enable you to really target the important control points and therefore carry out an assessment of each of the requirements applicable to the company.
Once this analysis has been carried out, the next step is to assess how the company can achieve compliance. This can be done by drawing up an action plan (also known as a "compliance plan"), which will enable the company to plan how to comply with each of the deviations detected during the audit or control.
INTERNAL AUDITOR TRAINING
If you would like to discover or develop your skills in regulatory monitoring or organise training for internal auditors, we offer training courses on request.
To do so, please write to us at hello@qse-software.ch
