Tropicalizing Your Compliance Program with Carlos Ayres

What happens when a compliance program gets lost in translation? Or worse, what if you translate your compliance program but it's still missing important information and details? Carlos Ayres, Founding Partner at Maeda, Ayres & Sarubbi Advogados, works with compliance, investigations, and government enforcement to implement and enhance their compliance programs and anti-corruption measures. Tom and Carlos discuss the importance of ‘tropicalizing’ your compliance program and how it benefits the organization.What does tropicalizing your compliance program mean? Let's say you have a company in the United States and you decide to open a satellite branch in Latin America. It’s common practice for US-based headquarters to share their compliance programs and other resources to help set up the international branch. This is where the problems usually start. Compliance training programs and policies are often directly translated into the international branch's language with little to no regard for local compliance contexts and circumstances. This creates the opportunity for complete misreadings and misunderstandings of the compliance guidelines. This bare-minimum approach to sharing compliance programs across international borders often leaves the international branch vulnerable to compliance issues – which may lead to the violator's incarceration. Carlos talks about how the risk of non-compliance in the non-US branch/es is significantly higher because the employees don't understand the compliance risks and that they've even committed infractions in the first place.Carlos shares how using local databases to cross-reference the data in the US-based compliance program can improve its relevance to the non-US branch. Companies even have the option to hire vendors to conduct due diligence and provide key information that will help fill the missing data.Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense, so it's vital that non-US branches have proper compliance training programs. They'll have to be equally trained to comply both with US HQ policies as well as with local laws. Carlos talks about how companies should try to conduct compliance training using the non-US branch's local language for better training engagement and retention. He also mentions how making the training content more culturally appropriate helps keep participants from losing interest in the course material.On internal investigations, Carlos shares his opinion on data privacy laws and how they affect companies in Latin America. There's also the issue of how companies should handle hold notices. He says that a hold notice is best presented to an employee after the data and documents have been properly preserved or accounted for. Delivering the hold notice too early might result in employees attempting to destroy or tamper with evidence.Based on today's conversation, tropicalizing your compliance program shows promising benefits. It goes to show that relying on just compliance policy translations isn't enough to ensure compliance in a non-US-based branch. Focus on helping people understand what compliance training is for and how it can help them in the long-run.Ongoing EducationIf you’re a compliance professional looking for a convenient and effective way to fulfill your continuing education requirements, go to FCPAComplianceReport.com/Courses and choose from 4 hour-long training packages that will keep you up to date with the latest developments in the compliance field.Carlos AyresLinkedIn Website Email