How can compliance and risk professionals ever hope to prevent their staff from doing the wrong thing if it is condoned explicitly or implicitly by management? Then again, can you blame management for not holding ethical practices above all else if they stand to lose market share if they do?

Several compliance and risk professionals have remarked to me that if you don’t have management on side, you may as well give up. One said the right culture is a mindset, and therefore ultimately the responsibility of the senior management.

But if CEOs and directors are fleeting or don’t have a good understanding of the business, you can perhaps forgive them for having a particular focus on the bottom line rather than something as difficult to grasp and put on a balance sheet as the right culture.

As always, if everybody sticks to the same rules, then all is okay. If they are not set in stone, once a competitor decides to flaunt them, or just doesn’t have equivalent controls in place, then they gain an advantage and the pressure is on the rest of the market do the same.

The primary responsibility to shareholders and profits will always win in the end, unless the playing field is re-levelled for all via regulatory and government intervention. I know that is a heretical statement for many. Any intervention should be based on hard evidence that there are systemic problems but it is one good reason governments still exist.

Corporate social responsibility is a case in point. Its latest incarnation – corporate sustainability – now appears in the speeches and on the websites of corporations worldwide. It has only become universal because governments have finally decided to do something about massive environmental damage.

This is of course a result of a huge shift in public opinion. Still, I only know of one person who has actually changed their bank recently because of its environmental initiatives. In general, self-interest prevails. Businesses exist to make money. Some are also important pillars of the whole economy, such as the banks, or telecommunications companies, and as a result are heavily regulated. But ultimately, are the decisions they take calculated on the basis of protecting the consumer or the company? The interests coincide only as far as companies want to keep their customers. As long as their influence grows socially, economically and environmentally, I don’t think that companies should be too surprised to find themselves subject to more scrutiny and restrictions.

It seems unavoidable then that wider responsibilities should somehow be built into the system and the rewards and penalties that influence the hip pockets of senior management. Perhaps the experiment we are now witnessing with risk-based legislation will help to introduce a greater sense of corporate responsibility.