Resources of the Week: Compliance Round-Up
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
In the course of looking for material to post on DocuTicker, I occasionally see papers and reports that tend toward the esoteric -- at least for me. Not that this stops me from including a particular document; if the source is good, I figure that people who know a lot more about a given topic than I do would probably be glad to learn that something new is available.
Every once in awhile, when it seems as if I am seeing a lot of information about a subject I really don't understand well, I feel driven to explore, to "read around" until I get a better feel for what it's all about. Take "compliance," for example. Reports keep coming out about compliance in the health care industry, compliance in the financial arena, IT compliance... I always assumed that compliance was a relatively straightforward thing -- e.g., doing what someone or some entity tells you to do. (I work for the military.) But the fact that there are so many reports and studies about it -- and that it hits the news on a regular basis -- would indicate that it's really quite a complex issue.
Compliance, in this sense, really means "regulatory compliance" -- specifically, corporate regulatory compliance with rules set forth by various and sundry government agencies. A good starting point, if you want to get an overall sense of what is involved here -- at least from a U.S. perspective -- is the Compliance Assistance section of the Office of Management and Budget's Business.gov website, which bills itself as "the single access point to all government services and information to help businesses operate within the parameters of Federal rules and regulations." This is a relatively new site that is directed mainly at small business, and it offers "compliance assistance summaries and points of contact" for an extensive list of "cabinet" agencies (e.g., the U.S. Department of Agriculture) and "non-cabinet" agencies (e.g., U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).
Why is this here? "The Small Business Paperwork Relief Act of 2002 requires the Office of Management and Budget in conjunction with the Small Business Administration to publish on the Internet a list of the compliance assistance resources available at federal agencies for small businesses. With help from the Small Business Administration’s National Ombudsman, the OMB has assembled a list of available compliance assistance resources and the agency contact." You can view the list by agency or by point of contact (alphabetical).
Some pieces of compliance regulation are more "famous" than others. For instance, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (PDF; 209 KB), which has to do with financial accounting rules. News.com offers a Sabanes-Oxley Cheat Sheet that provides an excellent overview, without throwing a lot of technical details at you.
Another piece of compliance legislation that has likely crossed your radar screen is HIPAA -- the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 -- which applies to health care institutions and providers. The most notable slice of this particular pie has to do with medical privacy. Remember that booklet or fact sheet you received at your doctor's office, and the form you had to sign that acknowledged you'd received it? Here is a nice collection of Congressional Research Service reports on HIPAA via the University of North Texas Libraries. HIPAA 101 is a PowerPoint presentation by Electronic Medical Records Inc. which provides basic information. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has an excellent fact sheet, HIPAA Basics: Medical Privacy in the Electronic Age.
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