Showing papers by "Christine Parker published in 2003"

Regulator-Required Corporate Compliance Program Audits

Abstract: This paper critically examines the ability of compliance program audits to provide adequate assurance of compliance system performance. The empirical evidence comes from the use of compliance program audits in monitoring compliance with enforceable undertakings agreed upon between companies (that have allegedly breached the law) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The evidence suggests that the primary value of compliance program audits in this context is as a management review that induces better compliance. Nevertheless, it may be the formal regulatory expectation of verification (and the belief that it is possible) that gives the compliance review its power to encourage management to listen and respond to auditors’ recommendations for improvement. The danger is that the review aspect of the audit will be captured by management concerns. This is evident in a tendency for the audit methodology to focus on management systems at the expense of forensic investigation of harm done (or likely to be done) to consumers and investors, and in a failure to seek out public opinion and input. This style of audit undermines the basic regulatory objective of democratic accountability for corporate responsibility. I conclude by using the literature on critical social audits to show that there is, nonetheless, significant potential for compliance program audits to open corporate management to democracy, and to make some suggestions as to how this might be possible. © 2017 Wiley. All rights reserved.

Aspects of Regulatory Reform in the Legal Profession: Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands

Abstract: Regulation has transformed the role of government and business through establishing a series of rules and guidelines that aim to promote efficiency and economic growth while at the same time protecting consumer interests. Several economic activities are subject to regulation, ranging from air transport, to telecommunications and retailing. Suppliers of professional services are, however, subject to possibly the greatest amount of regulation, such as rules on advertising behaviour, fee calculation and general conduct in the provision of such services. The reasons for such extensive involvement centre on market failure, principally an information asymmetry between providers and clients. This asymmetry is used to restrict the provision of professional services on claims of protecting clients against incompetent practitioners, because clients have less information than suppliers and so cannot judge the quality of the service themselves. This asymmetric information problem is compounded by the infrequency of purchase. The solution up to recently has been regulation. This paper surveys and analyses aspects of the national programmes of regulatory reform in the Australian, Irish and Dutch legal professions, starting with the current extent of reforms that are mostly economic based. The coverage between the three countries is not necessarily equal due to differences in the extent of the regulatory reform process and differences in the amount of empirical evidence in each of the three countries. We focus on competition reforms because in each of the three countries studied, this type of reform is at the forefront of the regulatory reform agenda. From this economic focus we detail what issues have not been fully addressed in the regulatory reform agenda and how this can be overcome by augmenting the traditional economic approach with a sociological approach to