Fcpa Compliance Report

Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) very quietly released a document, entitled “Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs” (Evaluation), on the Fraud Section website. The document is an 11-part list of questions which encapsulates the DOJ’s most current thinking on what constitutes a best practices compliance program. Within the list are some 46 different questions that a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance practitioner can use to benchmark a compliance program. In short, it is an incredibly valuable and most significantly useful resource for every compliance practitioner. The document has one clear theme that I will be exploring this month—you must operationalize your compliance program. The Evaluation, most generally, follows the DOJ and Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) seminal Ten Hallmarks of an Effective Compliance Program, released in the 2012 FCPA Guidance. If there is one over-riding theme in the Evaluation, it is the DOJ’s emphasis on doing compliance as the questions pos