Joe Murphy (jemurphy5730@gmail.com) is a Senior Advisor at Compliance Strategists, SCCE’s Director of Public Policy, and Editor-in-Chief of CEP Magazine.
I have been doing compliance work since my first corporate job in 1976. My college mentor (Professor Jay Sigler) and I published the first book on compliance in 1988.[1] Our field’s history was a firsthand experience for me.
Here is my suggestion for exploring this history: talk to those who were around back then. I have heard many generalized misstatements about the past. For example, we did not just have codes written by lawyers, although there were some. We did not just have lectures on the law, although some people did that. We did not think that policies magically caused people to comply. We were not in a distant tower; we talked with our employees.