Organizing a Corporate Ethics and Compliance Office, business and finance homework help

Organizing a Corporate Ethics and Compliance Office, business and finance homework help

Organizing a Corporate Ethics and Compliance Office

In this assignment, you are going to analyze an example of a common approach to structuring a Corporate Ethics and Compliance Office. Partly because of the scope of legal risk and partially because of legal mandates, health products and pharmaceutical companies have developed elaborate corporate ethics and compliance structures. Follow this link http://sustainability.baxter.com/governance-ethics-compliance/structure-and-programs.html to Baxter Corporation’s Ethics and Compliance Division and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various alternatives to organizing a corporate compliance office. Read Baxter’s description of its corporate structure for ethics and compliance and complete the following task:

  • Create an organizational chart (one page or less) of Baxter’s Ethics and Corporate Compliance Division (Corporate Responsibility Office).
  • Create a list of all of the initiatives Baxter claims it has implemented to ensure corporate compliance and social responsibility.

Submit two pages or less to the Dropbox following your facilitator’s instructions.

Overview

As the bars closed behind him at the Federal Prison in Pensacola, Florida, legal compliance and ethics didn’t seem theoretical to him anymore. This young, gifted, rising corporate star was now a convicted felon, and his future was, at best, uncertain. He simply ignored the law and corporate compliance when it got in the way of profits. He went to prison because he broke the law. However, his conduct and that of his company was a problem long before laws were broken. Not everything legal in business meets our own individual and corporate ethical code. In other words, ethical and legal are related but they are not the same. Business entities don’t operate ethically by accident. They don’t build corporate responsibility into their corporate DNA without purposeful planning and implementation. They don’t monitor and assess their collective corporate behavior without implementing specifically designed techniques and approaches for assessing corporate compliance. This week you will explore methods and structures for ensuring that business entities are built and operate ethically, not by accident, but because of specific policies and structures.

Learner Outcomes

Upon completion of this week, you should be able to:

  1. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of corporate codes of conduct.
  2. Review alternatives for centralized and decentralized offices of compliance.
  3. Analyze specific ethics and compliance-promoting techniques for cost-benefit including, but not limited to, hotlines, anonymous reporting structures, board level management of integrity reporting, and employee training and certification.
  4. Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of Whistle-Blower laws for corporate performance and responsibility.