Suparna Goswami and the Compliance Evangelist Talk Novartis on HealthCare Info Security and Fraud IO

I was recently interviewed by Suparna Goswami about the Novartis corruption enforcement actions, both the US domestic and the international FCPA matter. Incidents of fraud at pharmaceutical giant Novartis that resulted in over $1 billion in fines worldwide might have been avoided if the company's compliance team used data analytics to detect patterns, says Thomas Fox, a compliance evangelist and author.

The Novartis case involved illegal payments and perks provided to physicians in exchange for prescribing certain drugs.

Too often, corporations' compliance teams lack access to the data that's necessary to do their jobs, Fox says in a video interview with Information Security Media Group. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, track doctors that prescribe their drugs. "The data is there. But the compliance function simply does not have access to that data".

In this interview, highlights include:

• Novartis' fraudulent practices and how the entire episode played out in multiple countries;
• Important lessons for compliance officers from this fraud case;
• Why compliance teams usually are not able to leverage data analytics;