Evaluating Regulatory Compliance: Standards and Best Practice

Abstract

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has developed a number of innovative regulatory strategies for motivating companies to implement trade practices compliance programs. This article examines how companies and regulators will be able to determine whether a compliance program is actually effective. Two measures of quality are useful: comparison with best practice and reference to absolute standards such as the new Australian Standard on Compliance Programs (AS3806). The most pressing challenge is for companies to develop the capacity to evaluate the effectiveness of their own programs, and for regulators to require them to do so and "meta-evaluate" the effectiveness of their ev..