Ethics and Compliance Offices

The first corporate ethics offices were created in 1985 to provide employees with training about company standards of conduct and their applicability to particular job responsibilities. The offices were also designed to be a confidential means to seek advice about difficult business situations, as well as to report misconduct without fear of reprisal. The U.S. Sentencing Commission looked specifically to such programs when in 1991 it articulated the mitigation factors to be considered when sentencing organizations. The Commission’s focus on deterrence and detection of crime caused many companies to transform existing ethics programs into ethics and compliance offices. In 2004, the Commission issued revised guidelines in an effort to shift the corporate focus back to ethics and to management’s responsibility to create an ethical culture in order to achieve compliance.