MyComplianceOffice Blog

Employees at all levels of the organization make decisions that impact compliance every single day. To ensure that those decisions are wise ones, employees need to understand where they fit into the organization. If there's not a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities supported by controls and accountability there's a risk of chaotic compliance—and a chaotic culture across the firm.

Legislation has passed both Houses of the Australian Parliament to introduce the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR).

The 2023 Bill establishes a financial accountability regime to impose obligations on directors and senior executives of financial entities in the banking, insurance and superannuation industries. These obligations will cover accountability, key personnel, deferred remuneration and notification to Regulators (meaning APRA and ASIC collectively, or only APRA where it is the sole Regulator).

If the first stage of a pragmatic Know Your Obligations strategy is deconstructing and understanding compliance obligations to define where you need to keep your focus, the next step is mapping policies, procedures and controls to performance indicators to be able to accurately assure compliance.

Essentially, at this stage, we need to answer the question: What do we actually need to monitor?

Insider trading cases have seen a variety of sentences over the years. However, some jurisdictions have recently increased their focus on these cases, seeing more convictions and higher sentences. Blackout periods are a critical component of any public company’s trading policy to minimise the risk of insider trading occurring.

Insider dealing is a perennial concern for regulators around the globe. Agencies like the SEC, the FCA, BaFin and the AMF are using the latest technology to detect insider trading, misuse of insider information and market abuse. Regulators increasingly expect as well that firms will have the latest technology in place in order to demonstrate that they are taking a comprehensive and proactive approach to managing access to insider information and employee personal account dealing compliance.