Quoted, Compliance Culture: Are You Covered?, FAO Today

"Compliance Culture: Are You Covered?" FAO Today, June 2008.

How does a company want to be seen as doing business? This is a question raised by analysts and advisors, compliance officers, and the C-suite who sees compliance as the bottom line for doing business.

Talking about the importance of ethics and compliance to FAO Today, Randall Parks was quoted saying: "Ethics and compliance are essential in these days of WorldCom, Enron, and Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbanes-Oxley was the wake-up call that changed the compliance environment completely." “Companies now have entire departments devoted to it. We find our clients are extremely active in compliance areas,” said Parks. "Companies are focusing on compliance program development and training to ensure that a compliance culture permeates from the corner offices to the front lines. The sentencing guidelines put a premium on written programs and having things in place to demonstrate your focus, as an organization, on compliance. Creating a paper trail has become critical, and you have to spend a lot of time doing it,” he added.

Parks is a partner and co-chair of global technology and outsourcing practice group in the Richmond office of Hunton & Williams LLP. His practice focuses on complex commercial contracting matters, particularly business process and information technology outsourcing, licensing, systems acquisition, development and integration agreements and joint ventures.