The storm of widespread public and political concerns on corporate misgivings, particularly in the financial services industry has spurred growing regulatory demands worldwide making compliance an evergreen item on the leadership and governance agenda. Compliance with prescribed regulatory standards affords the comfort of supervisory cushion and creates a perceived endorsement of organisational practices by regulatory authorities, vested with surveillance and enforcement powers, which mitigate post effects of alleged wrongdoings to some extent. Compliance is therefore regarded as a safe harbour capable of shielding organisations from reputational risk in the unfortunate advent of a corporate scandal. However, whilst compliance is deemed necessary for good governance, it is not, in itself, sufficient to guarantee the practice of such good governance at all times. In fact, the presumption of alignment with prescribed regulatory requirements confers the illusory assurance of an integrated safety net around organisations. As efforts are geared to meet regulatory standards, rising compliance costs in business are a cause of concern to many. Considered an unavoidable and necessary by-product of business operations, there is a natural tendency to adopt a passive approach to compliance. Ticking the compliance box allows organisations to promptly overcome regulatory hurdles and devote focused time and effort in the pursuit of their respective business objectives. Essentially therefore, compliance is seen as a psychological block to the development of controls depicting the ceiling of what ought to be done. Yet, far from representing the maximum threshold of internal governance systems, it is argued that compliance with prescribed regulations in fact, informs of minimum standards that ought to be satisfied.The debate surrounding box-ticking compliance efforts is nevertheless not only real but takes altogether another shape when concurrently, some market participants indulge into “compliance-gloss” (a term coined by the author here to demonstrate the non-authentic spirit underlying compliance attempts) and develop the habit of learning how to best influence compliance outcomes so as to obtain expected regulatory-driven outputs, manoeuvring through enabling factors, without investing the genuine commitment that would otherwise, have enhanced the overall effectiveness of the governance system.It is argued that this method creates dissonance in the organisational climate and can result in negative compliance as employees seek to reconcile the perceived dichotomy of corporate objectives.In this issue, Reena Mulliah-Moonoosamy considers the extent to which corporates are authentic in their endeavours of meeting compliance obligations. The discussion leads to a far cry for leaders to rethink the way they might approach the compliance challenge suggesting a solution towards right as opposed to best practices. This back-to-basics path, it is asserted, aims to ensure real-life concerns are pragmatically addressed rather than sticking to abstract and complex models which, while being conceptually sound, may turn out to be dysfunctional and fall short of addressing the concrete issues faced by businesses
