Use Case: A Smarter Approach to Managing Conflicts of Interest

How does workflow automation enable compliance professionals to address and resolve conflict-of-interest issues far more effectively than ever before?

Imagine the following scenario: you’re a compliance officer at a consumer software company. The husband of your CTO – a highly regarded technologist and industry veteran – gets appointed as a board director at a major Cloud hosting service.

The problem is, your company does a significant amount of business with that hosting company. And the CTO herself is directly responsible for negotiating contracts with the cloud vendor in question – and several others – that can stretch into the millions of dollars.

The situation presents the kind of complex, high-level conflict of interest (COI) that is going to need the ongoing attention of multiple stakeholders in the company, from the CEO to legal and probably even members of your own board.

TAP Workflow Automation + PolicyHub

Such scenarios are not at all uncommon, and they also point up the difficulties many compliance teams face in trying to address COIs with existing technologies. The fact is, while most companies have policies and procedures in place to help mitigate conflicts of interest, most of the policy management tools in place today tend to concentrate narrowly on the management, distribution, and attestation of policies. They are not, however, geared to address the unique nature and characteristics of managing COIs, which can arise abruptly and evolve over time.

To overcome this issue, Mitratech is now coupling our best-in-class PolicyHub policy management solution with TAP Workflow Automation, creating a powerful new toolset for managing COIs across the organization. It’s a unique approach that features all of the capabilities and attributes essential for effective, compliant COI management:

Usability

The goal with any compliance program is 100% participation of employees. That’s not going to happen if your policy management system is difficult to use. Mitratech employs a SaaS deployment methodology, so our solutions are available from virtually anywhere. The system also incorporates an intuitive web interface predicated on an easy-to-adopt, easy-to-use model that ensures our users see improvements in policy awareness and compliance almost immediately.

Tracking and Logging

Many organizations fall prey to relying purely on having policies and procedures, and yet don’t have an effective way to log and track conflicts. Ideally, you want a COI solution that can track issues over time and processes through to resolution. With Mitratech’s coupled solution, users solve this problem by applying best-in-class policy management that is paired with process automation and intuitive workflow design tools to provide full-disclosure tracking and logging.

Report and Audit

Documenting the communications around COIs is so important because auditors or regulators can at any time ask you about your COI processes. Ultimately, they will want to see evidence that your compliance program is effective, and they’ll also want to see full lifecycle management. That is, an audit trail of policy distribution and acceptance, all the way through to COI disclosures and remediation. Having a power reporting tool is essential to ensuring you have a robust single source of truth, and providing it in a timely fashion.

By integrating advanced workflow automation capabilities with our proven policy management solution, Mitratech is delivering a highly effective platform for organizations that need to maintain strict compliance with conflict of interest policies.

To learn even more about this, check out our webinar on the topic, Introducing Exceptions and Disclosures to Policy Management.

Users find this pairing of solutions to be highly effective in all situations where exceptions and disclosures come into play. In our next post, we’ll take a look at how you can address policy exceptions – issues around accommodations that may need to be made for employee healthcare exceptions, device needs and so forth. See you next week!

Other risk & compliance resources that might be useful:

• Expert Guide: The 7 Hallmarks of Effective Compliance

• Blog Post: How Technology Helps Build an Effective Compliance Program

• Infographic: GRC Hurdles & High Jumps in Building a Culture of Compliance