The Fifth of the Five C’s of Compliance: Compliance

What comes first: safety or compliance? Unlike the chicken and the egg dispute, the safety and compliance debate is absolutely answerable, despite some confusion there appears to be in different industries. Compliance comes first. Safety can never be one hundred percent assured, but the closest we can get to achieving safety is through complete compliance one hundred percent of the time. Cutting corners of compliance is the same as cutting corners of the law. Regulations and standards are NOT made to be broken. They are made to protect life. I might tend to overuse sports analogies, but baseball is America’s favorite pastime. If Hunter Pence hits a homerun to win the game for the Giants, but he skips touching second base, then the homerun does not count. In this instance and in the case of compliance, it is never worth it to take any shortcuts because it puts everything at risk.

The goal of any industry or organization should not be to teach safety. We must teach complete compliance, and safety will follow. That is why it is so important to have an automated, all-encompassing regulatory change management system that tracks and documents everything to allow the organization to have the best chance at compliance. Let compliance lead the way to a safe environment.