Complying for compliance’s sake really helps no one.

It doesn’t help the regulators who enacted the rule to ensure some sort of protection or expertise was gained.

And it doesn’t help the company that is presumably getting none of benefits intended by the spirit of the rule.

But we see it again and again and again and again. And again.

Here is one such tale from a great post today over at The FCPA Blog by Aaron G. Murphy.

An interesting piece recently appeared in Randy Cohen’s “The Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine.

It discussed  an exchange with a company employee that should keep corporate legal and compliance departments awake at night. An employee, unhappy that his company wanted him to take a four hour on-line training course about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), claiming it was a waste of his time, asked The Ethicist if he had an ethical obligation to complete the training. The Ethicist gave the best possible answer, stating that even if it was inefficient, it was the company’s prerogative to train its people, and that it might not be the waste of time the employee assumed since the company could have a larger plan of action invisible to the employee.

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The punch line lay in the “Update” posted later: The employee skipped the course, went straight to the on-line test, and passed it. The employee, who underwent no training of any kind (and arrogantly assumed he needed no such training), is now certified by his own company as having mastered the FCPA. This is an all too common scenario, and everyone involved in it is a fool.

Murphy goes on to explain exactly why and how everyone involved is a fool and I encourage you to go read the rest.

But at this point, you probably already know why they are fools.