Competition Compliance Manuals And Protocols: The Low Hanging Case For A RESTORE

As the new year starts afresh for many business, compliance and legal departments alike are busy figuring out their budget priorities for the year. This is often not an easy exercise given the myriad of priorities and often limited budget. Expectedly, certain matters are placed on the back burner, as is often the case for compliance manuals and protocols.

On the rare occasions where budgets (albeit limited) are indeed allocated for the review and update of compliance manuals and protocols, three common situations are often observed:

• The (very) dated manual: we have seen compliance manuals that were last updated as far back as eight years ago. As laws and regulations do change (and increasingly at a quicker pace than before), an outdated compliance manual carries with it the real risk of irrelevance and worse, contains inaccurate guides on the applicable laws. Cosmetic and superficial updates to outdated manuals carry similar risks of irrelevance and inaccuracy.