We are on the final countdown to Number 500. Next week, on Monday, August 31, I will be celebrating my 500th Anniversary episode, where I will talk about some of the key changes I have seen in compliance over the past 10 years, plus highlights from some of my 500 podcasts. Today on the FCPA Compliance Report, I post Episode 497, which is an interview with Jonathan Armstrong. Armstrong is a long-time data privacy/data protection professional and co-founder of Cordery Compliance. We visit about the changes brought by the UK Bribery Act (UKBA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK Modern Slavery Act for the compliance professional.
Jonathan extends congratulations to the FCPA Compliance Report for its 500th Anniversary on behalf of the Queen.
10 years ago seems to be somewhat of a different world. The UK Bribery Act was passed in 2010 and became effective in 2011. While UK privacy and data protection laws existed prior to this time, GDPR had not yet come into existence. Of course, the UK Modern Slavery Act was passed in 2015. Now these laws are moving almost exponentially in terms of their fines, penalties and impact on compliance.
Max Schrems was in university in 2011 and he literally changed the world. He caused the mass of the US administration and the European Commission flying over the Atlantic to meet with each other, to put in place Privacy Shield in response to the criticism of Safe Harbor. Now they are getting ready to do the whole thing again, because Schrems and his team have effectively knocked out the privilege known as Privacy Shield, just as he did with Safe Harbor.
Another area explored is the UK picking up the challenge of updating is 1900 era anti-bribery law, with the passage of the Bribery Act of 2010. As Armstrong noted, this put “a new sheriff in town”. It also brought the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to the international stage as an enforcer. This role was borne out by the Roll-Royce international anti-corruption enforcement action, which was headed up by the SFO and facilitated by the US and Brazil. This new UK law obviously influenced other countries to pass anti-corruption legislation in the European Union (EU) and beyond. Both France and Brazil come to mind.
One area that Armstrong is very passionate about is the UK’s continued fight against slavery, which he termed “a job half done.” Obviously, Britain led the western world in fighting this scourge, led by Will Wilberforce. Here one might even consider the power of Amazing Grace. Yet Armstrong believes there is much left to do. He believes the UK government affected a cultural change on slavery with the passage of the Modern Slavery Act. He feels the British believe that they had stamped out slavery in the 1800s and put statues up to the likes of Wilberforce, who did do great work in trying to stop the evils of slavery.
But he notes “we still have slaves, probably two or three miles away from where I’m sitting here now, and they’re not working plantations, they’re working car washes, they’re working nail bars. They’ve got those little fish that are going to bite skin off my feet if I ask them to, but they’re here hidden in plain sight. And one of the things in the last 10 years or so that we’ve had, I think is the UK realizing that the fight against slavery was a job half done.” He believes that the UK Modern Slavery Act, “has been mold breaking.”
We concluded by looking at how compliance has changed over the past 10 years or so. Ten years ago, “it wasn’t really a profession as such. In the minds of many executives, it was a bit like the elephant’s graveyard. It was where executives in the business went to retire. It’s where they went to see the last two or three years out before their pension kicked in. And that’s definitely changed. I think we’ve seen the rise of compliance professionals, a rise in respect of compliance professionals and the recognition that they need to have the skills and the resources to do the job.”
Both anti-bribery compliance has helped this and with GDPR “the recognition of the data protection officer as an independent position, but partly the profession itself has done that work as well and shouted for the fact that it needs to be seen to be independent.” I hope you will listen to the full podcast to hear about these issues and many more from Armstrong (you can check it here). Also please plan to join me tomorrow, where I visit with Jay Rosen on the changes he has seen as a business development specialist, in moving from reactive to proactive compliance.
The schedule for this week is as follows:
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