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LEGISLATIVE AND REGULATORY TRACKING WITH LEGICRAWLER'S ®REVERSE CODE LOOKUPTM CAN ASSIST COMPLIANCE
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Have you ever wondered if a regulatory matter important to your industry has been tucked away in a state's appropriations bill? It happens. And suppose your industry is interested in the state but because of your limited resources, the state is not at the top of your radar screen? You may be facing a new requirement for your compliance team to tackle. Yet you don't even know about it yet. You need to stay on top of these things. But how? It's even tougher if the compliance item is in a new regulation. Say a troublesome bill became law in one your states a year or two ago, but you made note of it and moved on. That's not the end of the story. Agencies may well move in with rulemakings based on that enactment. Now things are more complicated for you - particularly if you don't know about it. More and more companies have compliance departments. Federal law weighed in on key requirements with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or "Sarbox," as some call it, a reaction primarily to the Enron scandal of a decade ago. The idea was to hold companies, their management and their accounting systems accountable to shareholders and investors. For businesses, federal compliance is an increasing headache. As The Wall Street Journal reported on September 27, "Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent." In other words, ignorance is no excuse. But that's just the beginning. Federal law isn't the only game in town. The U.S. Small Business Administration offers checklists on where to begin with such things as federal and local requirements for hiring. See http://www.sba.gov/content/10-steps-hiring-your-first-employee . But laws and rules are often in flux for hiring and other issues. For that reason, you need to stay abreast of the latest in legislation and proposed regulations. The changes won't always be where you expect them to be. For example, in 2009, a line deep in the major Ohio appropriations bill (Am. Sub. H.B. No. 1, 128th G.A.) exempted one solid waste facility from the statewide municipal solid waste fee. The Governor at that time, Democrat Ted Strickland, vetoed that provision to ensure, he wrote, "a level playing field for the entire solid waste industry in the State of Ohio." It is worth noting that Ohio's line-item veto power is given to the governor only on spending bills. But significantly, the governor may veto a policy provision tucked into a spending bill. Elsewhere, the same doorstop of a bill (more than 3,000 pages long) unexpectedly changed the fee for a certain financial service with an obscure reference to a state code section. No veto blocked that change. How do you avoid such a surprise? Try Legicrawler's legislative and regulatory tracking. With Legicrawler, you can pull up legislation or proposed regulations that fit your issues profile. FastForward TM is a Legicrawler innovation in the research industry. It's one aspect of Legicrawler's Reverse Code Lookup TM, which posts code references in tracked bills for your ready reference. In that hefty appropriations bill, the issues keywords would not have retrieved the bill for your tracking report. But the FastForward would have. Legicrawler is the only tracking service that pulls up and organizes code citations in your legislative tracking report. So keep that in mind as you confront the compliance maze. Legislation and regulations will always keep things in play. Let Legicrawler help you avoid unpleasant surprises.
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