Conflict of Interest Management

Addressing Conflicts of Interest and Disclosure Management

Increased complexity and lack of transparency has compelled many organizations to realize the need to track and update conflicts of interest (COI). Creating a culture of ethics and trust starts from the tone that you set at the top. When it comes to disclosure management that means being open with your employees and constituents that you do not want to control their relationships but you do need to know about their existing relationships to reduce the risk due to potential conflicts.

If your organization does not have a straightforward place for those disclosures to be made, they can easily be postponed or forgotten altogether, putting your organization at greater risk. Organizations need a clean way to communicate what those conflicts of interest may be, and provide an easy, unthreatening way for those disclosures to be made.

Start with Training on Conflicts of Interest

Step 1

Identify all the regulations and contracts that require COI disclosure.

Step 2

Clearly train employees on what constitutes a conflict of interest, and create a safe environment to talk about them.

Step 3

Utilize an automated policy management solution to distribute disclosures to all your employees, tracking who has read and completed their disclosure questionnaire in a central database.

Step 4

Track COI investigations and resolutions and run reports with an integration between your policy management software and your incident management system.