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January 6, 2020
It’s hard to believe it’s officially the Twenties now, but it’s likely the new decade won’t see an easing in the amount of global regulatory changes we’ve experienced in recent years. Ever since the global financial crisis in 2008, regulators both local and international have sought ways and means to make organizations more transparent in operations, and to eliminate any levers or corners for anyone to hide dodgy doings.
Even those who do everything by the book - and let’s be honest, most organizations out there just want to operate within the lines - are facing this ever-growing burden of regulatory compliance. There are filing deadlines and reports needed on a regular basis, and it can be hard for any compliance manager to keep up with the demands of jurisdictions.
In this environment, it’s hugely important to have all your compliance and governance ducks in a row. Those responsible for compliance within an organization - whether that’s looking after the clients of a legal firm or the regulatory fortunes of a corporate operation - must ensure they have a way to keep up with the changes to deadlines and requirements, one which is flexible enough to change quickly but still robust enough to ensure no current deadlines are missed.
Enter: the compliance calendar. Labour legislation, industry regulation and reporting requirements are changing every day, and missing something can potentially incur penalties and cause reputational damage to the organization. It’s surprisingly easy to miss an important requirement or deadline in a complex regulatory environment, and even a minor mishap in a far-flung entity can cause a ripple all the way through an international group structure and hit the parent company hard.
The compliance calendar is a way to keep track of all requirements across all jurisdictions to help ensure nothing goes amiss or astray. When working in an international structure, a compliance calendar can help to pinpoint the compliance status and requirements in every jurisdiction to ensure efficient legal operations; in smaller companies the calendar is no less important, ensuring entities remain in good standing and able to legally operate wherever they are.
The calendar doesn’t just track reporting dates; it can also be a way to track filings such as minutes of board meetings, annual report filing deadlines and so on to make sure internal meetings and groups are brought together in plenty of time to meet the regulatory requirements.
Most regulators and official organizations will produce a calendar of filing dates as a way to keep firms up to date, but most come with the caveat that it may not be a complete listing of all of a firm’s regulatory and compliance filings. This one from FINRA in the US even says that firms “must do their own due diligence to ensure that they comply with all of their regulatory and filing requirements”, and that “their reliance on this report does not create a safe harbor from a firm’s regulatory responsibilities” - tough talk for an official body, but it shows the importance of cross-referencing multiple sources to get those ducks ready.
Compliance calendars centralize those important dates and deadlines, tracking requirements such as critical regulations, reporting obligations, industry filings, permits and accreditations. And it doesn’t just look at the external obligations; internal events such as the AGM or any training sessions could also be added to your compliance calendar.
Using a compliance calendar isn’t just about getting the year’s dates in the first week of January and then never checking again; to keep your entity compliance calendar fit for the new year all year, paralegals and legal operations professionals need a way to regularly check deadlines and requirements without the updating turning into a full time job itself.
This compliance calendar could just be a diary, or it could be a spreadsheet, but those don’t meet the flexible, secure and robust criteria needed to make sure your compliance calendar is fit for the new year. Manual updating also takes a lot of time, and carries the risk of human error being introduced into the system. More and more paraprofessionals are turning to digital means of tracking compliance, especially with automation and machine learning bringing compliance and governance right into the 21st century.
A digital compliance calendar that’s part of a robust entity management solution can bring many benefits to an organization, including:
Switching between multiple platforms is both time-consuming and risky; today’s paralegals would rather work with a single platform that integrates with all the other processes and systems they use. It’s a matter of consolidating services to drive efficiencies.
You want to use an entity management system that provides a better customer experience, one that’s intuitive, easy to use and easy to navigate. The Athennian legal entity management platform has been, and will continue to be, developed in collaboration with its users - people just like you, with similar challenges to solve.
Athennian’s compliance calendars and tracking for legal entities are designed to help you never miss a filing deadline, making it easy to track thousands of filing and compliance events across entities and jurisdictions with automated reminders, email notifications, data reports and more.
Discover how we can help you be more efficient and take back control over compliance; book a demo to see how the Athennian entity compliance calendar can get our entity operations fit for the new year.
Athennian.com is the top reviewed legal entity management cloud platform for law firms and in-house corporate teams. Athennian is used by innovative organizations that value modern software with elegant automation and workflows. Integrating entity data management, document assembly, eSign, org charts, and e-file, Athennian is selected by leading law firms and corporate legal and tax teams to scale legal entity governance. Athennian offers rapid migration services for customers from any legacy database including ALF, CorpLink, EnAct, GlobalAct, EnGlobe, FastCompany, Corporate Focus, Blueprint (Diligent Entities), GEMS, hCue, Effacts and more.
"Very easy to use, modern interface, excellent support. Athennian has an amazing conversion team. They helped us migrate all of our data and the training was very good."
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