Changing Trends in Governance Risk and Compliance

It’s an old adage that the only thing constant in this world is Change. You’d agree, now even more, in the current environment, that change is all-pervasive. However, tell me honestly, if it has happened with you also that the change was round the corner waiting for us to see and respond, however, we failed to recognize it until it come and disrupted us, forcing us to adopt the change.

 

Wouldn’t it be better then, that we became proactive in identifying the change even before it occurs and devise our strategies to proactively adapt to the change. All this requires us to slow down, stop back, observe and think.

 

For instance, take a look at the following key changes in the Compliance Paradigm in the last few years:

 

Digital: Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), Income Tax Dept, GST Dept, RBI, SEBI, Trademarks, PF, ESI and many more government departments are completely on digital platforms and the remaining ones are following soon.

 

Oversight: The digitization and e-Governance is fast changing the job profile of the regulators and government officers from managing manual files and records to an effective and stricter scrutiny and oversight, enabled by Robotics and Artificial intelligence. With a click of the button, thousands of show-cause notices are issued and e-assessments are convened. The current pandemic has taught us that even virtual hearings are also possible.

 

Integration: Enabled by the digital databases, sharing of information and data between different government departments is all the more easy. We have seen notices from the revenue departments in the past, over allotments filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Similarly,if you would have applied for passes for opening up of the offices after the lock-down and shared your employee details, make sure that you are complying with all the labour laws, since all this information is now available with the labour department.

 

Severity: Sample this: The penalties under Companies Act, 2013 are up from a few thousand rupees to a range of Rs. 1 Lacs to 1 Crore or more; for FEMA contraventions you may have to cough up over 300% penalty of the amount involved; TDS and GST non-deposits carry huge interest and penalties; Every law that is amended/replaced with a new one, increases the penalties from a few hundred rupees to a few lacs rupees or even more. Many non-compliances carry imprisonment provisions for Directors and Key-Managerial Personnel and also threaten cancellation of business license.

 

Pace of change: The pace of change in the laws now has increased at an ever increasing rate. Gone are the days when laws used to be amended once in every 10-15 years or not even that much. Not only the laws are now changing every year, every month and every day but so is the governance and compliance. During the past 3 months of Covid alone, there have been over 500 notifications, circulars, orders and advisories issued by several government departments to respond to this sudden change.

 

Complexity: Tracking, understanding and analyzing the impact of legal changes under all applicable laws is increasingly becoming difficult for any single professional or a small team

 

So how should you manage Governance, Risk & Compliance in this challenging environment?

 

It is clear that the old approach of “managing compliance” will not work any more and we have to be more proactive in “compliance management”. If you think that the manual processes have worked in the past and therefore they will work in future also, you may be in for a big surprise. It’s high time to automate our Governance, Risk & Compliance Frameworks and adopt a true digital strategy to manage the enhanced risks posed by the changing environment.

 

Complinity is one such Integrated Cloud-based Software that helps you to digitize, automate and manage your Compliances, Contracts, Litigation, Secretarial, Audit, Internal Controls, Assessments, Registrations, Insurance, Documents, Legal Updates, Tasks and much more !!!

​

With Complinity by your side, you can drive efficiencies, enhance visibility and transparency across the organization, manage legal updates and compliances on a real-time basis and minimize the risks and penalties with the help of technology. Whether you are a company with a turnover of Rs. 10 cr or you are a billion-dollar company, Complinity can add value to you. Complinity is a true-cloud based B2B SaaS platform with 256-bit data encryption and secured protocols and does not require any capital investments in purchasing costly licenses nor requires any separate hardware. It’s plug-and-play on your laptop and you can implement it quickly in a Do it Yourself (DIY) mode.