We focus on preventing corporate malfeasance while pursuing growth. From what we know, intentional misconduct or negligent decisions by humans are not innate. Such behavior is learned because it was useful in the past, it promises prospects of reward in the future, or risks are overlooked. That can be changed because the majority of people has the capacity of deliberate thinking, benefit drive, as well compassion and a sense of justice.
Prevention is still understood as top down communication of rules which have to be applied. Threat of punishment shall help to deterre miscounduct. Whistleblowing shall help to detect crime and misdeeds. However, a resounding success in overcoming the compliance risk has not yet been achieved.
Nevertheless, without effectiveness evidence of their Compliance Management Systems (CMS) the industry invests year after year in cost-intensive e-learning and face-to-face programs that according to around half of the CCOs are doubtful or poor in results. This assumption is underlined by the fact that white-collar crime has not changed significantly since 2014.
PWC concludes in its study on white-collar crime: "The qualitative enterprise surveys show that the implementation still has significant weaknesses. You can see that the pure training and its repetition is not really effective." The Department of Justice (USA) recognizes that firms might be spending a lot and creating all the components of compliance programs but actually producing hollow facades.
Why is that?
Every crime or misconduct is preceded by a human decision. A system needs rules without question but its effectiveness will only unfold if the people who make decisions within this system also adhere to it. Since the existence of a set of rules does not guarantee application, e-learning and classroom trainings are far from sufficient. Thus, businesses that rely solely on these prevalent rules teaching models (Do no harm!) face significant risk. Our empiric industry data can proof that mere rules teaching provides moderate to near zero effect in practice.Thus, any preventional training without knowing and internalizing the individual background of the decision-maker is almost meaningless.