Leader: Compliance time

The word compliance means different things to different people and now it seems that - after the excesses of the tech bubble that led to so much wrongdoing - we are now in an era where stringent financial and other rules and regulations have many people in business rolling their eyes.

silicon.com was recently in a meeting where a UK FTSE 100 company, which also has a New York listing, was lamenting the fact that it now has to substantiate every minute claim in every statement it puts out. No more "leading" this and "foremost" that - it has to footnote such claims with analyst and industry figures that back them up.

Is this such a bad thing? Two stories today point to the extra work compliance means. Industry association Intellect has published 'Ten Commitments' for IT suppliers to the UK government' - the aim is to give buyers some kind of assurance there won't be so many IT cock-ups in the future.

Meanwhile a report commissioned by a communications equipment vendor (of all organisations) finds regulations such as the US-centric Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Europe- and-banking-centric Basel II accord are having uncertain effects on IT directors' data storage needs.

We understand if all the well-run organisations out there throw up there arms and ask 'why', but it is the not-so-well-run companies we should worry about.

Economic booms throughout the past 100 years or even further back have invariably been accompanied by some level of corruption. Clearly what happened in the late 1990s - what led to SOX, in particular, but also a whole lot more - is evidence of that.

The idea isn't that as economies and specific sectors carry on recovering, employees, customers and shareholders - in other words, most of us - won't be victims of some or other kind of corporate wrongdoing. A few more checks and balances now aren’t a huge price to pay for that, even if they are increasingly spun as just more bureaucracy. In compliance, we're dealing with a difficult balancing act.