Section 2

Building Your Foundation

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Implement What You Know with Confidence

Discover action-based tools that provide simple steps for program improvement or robust plans for new ways of doing business. 

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Your ethics and compliance program is an ecosystem of moving parts. New laws and regulations, new lines of business, new geographies, mergers and acquisitions become part of a growing enterprise that your compliance ecosystem must support. 

Effective compliance programs are able to deftly navigate these complexities because they have built strong foundations that were developed with the nature of the compliance industry in mind.

This section will give you the expert advice and programmatic best practices to ensure the first steps you take to develop your program are in the right direction. Or if your program is more mature, these resources and insights will give you the necessary guidance to course correct and improve your program’s foundation at whichever stage it is in. 

 

How to Survive an International Joint Venture

Chapter 7 of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide for Compliance Professionals

There's 5 steps you can take to avoid pitfalls and be successful in an international joint venture. Learn why international joint ventures frequently get caught up in FCPA enforcement actions and discover what you can do to survive with Tom Fox.

Tom Fox 12/20/2017

Chapter 7 of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide for Compliance Professionals

There's 5 steps you can take to avoid pitfalls and be successful in an international joint venture. Learn why international joint ventures frequently get caught up in FCPA enforcement actions and discover what you can do to survive with Tom Fox.

4. Exercise Your Audit Rights

A key tool in successfully managing an international joint venture is auditing. Audit rights are a key clause in any compliance terms and conditions and must be secured. Your compliance audit should be a systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which your compliance terms and conditions are followed. You should work to obtain and review the relevant data; analyze and evaluate the data; and use the data as a basis to remediate any issues that have popped up through the operation of the joint venture.  
 

5. Invest in Process

In addition to monitoring and oversight of your joint ventures, you should periodically review the health of your joint venture management program. The robustness of your joint venture management program will go a long way towards preventing, detecting and remediating any compliance issue before it becomes a full-blown FCPA violation. As with all the previous steps, you need to fully document all steps you have taken so that any regulator can review and test your metrics. The Evaluation of Corporate Compliance programs lays out what the U.S. Department of Justine (DOJ) will be reviewing and evaluating going forward for your compliance program. You should also use these metrics to conduct a self-assessment on the state of your compliance program for your joint ventures.

The bottom line is joint ventures present a unique set of FCPA risks for the compliance practitioner. You will need to incorporate risk management techniques in all phases of the joint venture relations; pre-formation, the joint venture agreement and in operations after the joint ventures has begun operation. The compliance obligations and compliance process are ongoing.

Illustration by Dex Novak