Melbourne, Australia - June 25, 2008 - SAI Global Limited (ASX: SAI), a leading provider of governance, risk and compliance solutions has today issued a research report that outlines the key issues and emerging trends relating to risk and compliance management programs at leading Australian companies.
The research focuses on a select group of highly regulated industry sectors, specifically; utilities, mining, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, health, building and construction and food and beverage manufacturing. The report, titled ‘Risk and Compliance in Australia: The Issues and Trends as seen by Practitioners’ is based on the findings of an independent research project conducted by The Market Intelligence Co. on behalf of SAI Global between March and May of 2008.
The key findings of the research included:
- Managers remain predominantly focused, and hard pressed, ensuring compliance with an expanding and dynamic set of obligations despite aspirations to leverage risk and compliance into more strategic endeavours
- Keeping abreast of legislative and regulatory change, across all jurisdictions in which a company operates, and effectively applying the impacts of developments to business processes remains a time and resource intensive challenge
- Risk and compliance management programs remain decentralised and ‘siloed’, with different functional units and personnel responsible for assuring compliance with different obligations and managing business risks
- Environmental sustainability is emerging as a key focus area on the back of emerging, high profile issues such as carbon emissions trading, and increasing social pressures from the media, community and more vocal customers
- Managers are focused on implementing improved risk measures and controls to ensure their companies are better positioned to mitigate the impacts of economic volatility on company specific performance.
“Despite being highly regulated and particularly exposed to high profile, emerging regulatory and risk issues, limited research has been published to date on the risk and compliance programs of companies in non-financial services industries” said Ann Wootton, General Manager, Compliance Division, Asia Pacific at SAI Global. “We trust that this research will be insightful for risk and compliance professionals and enable them to form an indicative assessment of their own company’s risk and compliance management program relative to industry peers”.
Media Inquiries and Report Requests
Stephen Betros, Head of Marketing, Compliance AsiaPacific, SAI Global, steve.betros@saiglobal.com
About SAI Global Compliance
For almost twenty years, SAI Global Compliance clients have built stronger corporate cultures and more effective all-around programs with our compliance, risk management and governance solutions. With offices in more than 25 countries and on 4 continents, SAI Global provides legal, compliance and risk management professionals with a broad range of technology enabled programs and consulting services that facilitate good governance and awareness of compliance, ethics and policy issues. This includes risk and culture assessments; complete Code of Conduct services and training; award-winning, innovative online training and awareness; training needs assessments; risk- and region-specific online databases, regulatory alerts and newsfeeds; and GRC workflow solutions.