Compliance and the Culture Challenge

The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that, without appropriate social controls, life would be “nasty, brutish and short”. This rather dim view of humanity pervades much modern compliance practice. In a nutshell, the assumption is that people will do the wrong thing and the job of compliance departments is to prevent wrong-doing and if we can’t prevent it, we need to catch and punish the wrong-doers.*