Compliance risk – Different types of compliance you have to beware of

If you’re running a business, no doubt you’ll have had to at least skim through the thousands of compliance and regulation issues of your industry. It’s important that you keep to these set-out rules and laws for your customers, your employees, and overall, your business.

Lacking compliance at the very least results in a bad reputation for your business and can lead to heavy fines that can cripple a business.

Take a look at the different types of compliance to be aware of to get started.

Employee compliance

If your small business is progressing with its first employee, you’ve opened up your business to a whole new set of compliance issues. Employee compliance can be summed up with the phrase “Is the employee being treated fairly?”

There are laws in place to discourage discrimination, but there is also training required to make sure that harassment doesn’t take place in the workplace, and that the minimum amount of salary and benefits are being reached for the employee.

Consumer compliance

A lot more regulations are about customer compliance. This is especially important if you are selling a product that is to be ingested or topical, like food, alcohol, tobacco, vitamins, makeup, and skincare.

Recalling products for things that are obviously not a part of the recipe, like chocolate bars with metal in them, is crazy enough to make the news, but there are a lot of other regulations around what is a healthy amount of a product, like caffeine, alcohol, sugar, etc. that are to be stuck too.

On the skincare side, you can prompt allergies or undesired outcomes from makeup, like staining.

Small items in children’s toys that could cause choking, etc.

And then there are regulations around services. It’s important that you stick to ethical business operations for the sake of your consumer.

A good example of this is financial compliance, which is full of regulations to make sure that customers are treated fairly.

They are educated fairly on what would benefit them best with no coercion or unfulfilled promises, and no practices that would result in the unfair loss of their money.

Financial compliance

And then there is a regulation within the financial industry.

The two main goals of financial compliance are to deter money laundering and terrorism funding.

For example, a lot of online gambling sites are used for this very purpose, and financial businesses in the industry strive to tighten their security and put in place anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism funding practices.

Environmental compliance

Governments might be slow to slam down the hammer when it comes to sustainable business operations, but they do cover some environmental factors in their regulations.

It’s less a philosophy of “Do no harm” and more “Do no egregious harm” but it’s there and it’s changing for the better.

Thanks to the efforts of activists, the impact that businesses have on the environment is getting closely watched, and more and more regulations are coming into law that is designed to lessen that effect.

How you manage your waste, how you avoid pollution and contamination, and regulations specific to your industry are all being enforced by the government of where your base of operations is.

It’s important to keep your waste under control, not only for the sake of your business, not only for the sake of the planet but closer for home, the people immediately around you are affected by how you get rid of waste, such as the Flint water crisis.

Not least will you be harming people and the planet, but in a world where everyone is becoming more concerned about the state of the planet and are willing to show it on Twitter and with their wallets, maintaining environmentally friendly practices makes for a sustainable business.