Everyone has a life outside of work — or at the very least, they should — and that means that everyone has external financial and personal relationships that could become a conflict of interest for them. A conflict of interest (COI) is any situation in which one of these financial or personal relationships compromises – or has the appearance of compromising—a person’s professional judgement. COI management software is a comprehensive solution to identify, manage, and mitigate COI risks, making it a cornerstone for the integrity and health of your organization.
Because they can lead to decisions that are not in the company’s best interest, conflicts of interest can be harmful to businesses, jeopardizing their operational efficiency and tarnishing their reputation. To maintain trust with those outside the company, it is vital for companies to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. Fostering a culture of transparency and compliance, standing as a beacon of innovation, COI management software plays a vital role in automating the disclosure, tracking, and resolution of conflicts.
Managing COIs
Effective conflict management begins with the disclosure process, which is designed to catch potential conflicts of interest before they become an issue for employers. Typically, the process originates with a request for information from employees who fill out and submit a disclosure form, which prompts them to identify any current or potential conflicts of interest.
Following the submission of the form, a compliance officer will perform an assessment to determine whether a conflict truly exists. Most disclosures will be “negative disclosures”, meaning that an employee had nothing to disclose or that a disclosure did not constitute a conflict.
If an employee does have a qualifying outside interest to disclose, reviewers must consider several factors to determine if it’s a conflict of interest, such as the size of a financial transaction, the duration of a professional relationship, and how the public might perceive a situation. If reviewers determine an outside relationship is a conflict of interest, then it’s called a “positive disclosure”.
Positive disclosures must then be effectively managed in some way to mitigate the conflict. Examples of managing a conflict of interest could be requiring an employee to sell off stock in a company, limiting their role and responsibilities in some way, recusing themselves from certain activities, or disclosing the conflict to stakeholders and the public before they find out another way.
Understanding COI Management Software
COI disclosure is a time-consuming, tedious process, especially when you do it the old-fashioned way with paper forms and filing cabinets, which makes it challenging to keep track of all potential risks. However, COI management software serves as a highly effective risk mitigation tool, helping to manage these conflict disclosures, improving processes and protecting businesses from potential legal trouble.
Eliminating Hard Copy Forms & Recordkeeping
A manual system is rife with problems. Digging through filing cabinets to track down the right paperwork, it’s difficult to ensure all employees have submitted forms, and there’s potential for mistakes when inputting results into spreadsheets. Issues like these contribute to an unreliable process that fails to uncover all potential conflicts of interest that pose a threat to your business.
COI management software eliminates hard copy disclosure forms, allowing you to conduct the entire process digitally, share questionnaires online in a matter of minutes, easily track who has and hasn’t yet submitted their answers, and utilize a searchable database to find exactly what you’re looking for when you need it. Unlike physical files, software can’t be lost or damaged. Removing administrators from the role of entering data, digital forms minimize mistakes with less opportunity for errors.
Collecting Responses in One Place
Collecting and reviewing responses may be the most time-intensive part of COI disclosure. Most personnel won’t raise any issues. But finding the few employees that pose COI threats is like searching for needles in the haystack. The best way to ensure you haven’t passed over any responses is to collect them in a central location to which all reviewers will have access.
As responses come in, COI management software helps you easily analyze results for specific questions and from specific individuals. You’ll no longer need to worry about making sure a spreadsheet has been manually updated with the most up-to-date information. Instead, you’ll have real-time access to responses. If someone discloses a potential conflict, you can immediately react and investigate further.
Key Features of COI Management Software
Disclosure form creation
Conflicts of interest management software solutions play a vital role in jumpstarting the disclosure process through advanced form creation settings, letting organizations quickly and easily create the best disclosure forms possible. Advanced form creation features offer preset questions from which management can choose for their specific industry or situation. They can then customize the question sets, weigh different questions depending on their importance, and assign them risk-tiered flags.
Collecting disclosures
The most revolutionary aspect of COI management software is its automation features replacing cumbersome paper-based methods with efficient digital processes. Automated disclosure forms for employees, board members, and contractors along with automated reminders, real-time submissions, and live reporting for prompt issue detection ensures that all potential COIs are documented and nothing slips through the cracks.
Automating schedule
The automation capabilities of COI management software cannot be overstated. Routine tasks, such as sending disclosure forms or reminders, no longer rest on the shoulders of individual employees. Recurring disclosure cycles, automatic reminders, and deadline tracking reduce manual follow-up. These automated processes not only relieve manual burdens but also introduce a level of consistency and timeliness often lacking in manual operations.
Real-time detection
With real-time detection capabilities, COI management software acts as a vigilant watchdog, instantly flagging potential conflicts as they arise, eliminating the need for manual review and the possibility of delays in the process. These instant alerts enable organizations to act swiftly, addressing conflicts before they escalate into larger issues. The immediacy provided by this feature is invaluable, particularly in fast-paced sectors where interests and opportunities can change rapidly, requiring quick decision-making.
Comprehensive reporting
COI management software has comprehensive reporting tools that crystallize complex data into digestible reports, detailing disclosures, detected conflicts, and resolutions for compliance officers and leadership. Such detailed reports can reveal patterns and trends over time, identifying recurring risk areas and high-priority disclosures, which aids in refining policies and training to better manage COIs in the future. Standardized audit support and enforcement tools help organizations meet regulatory requirements.
Historical records
COI management software provides comprehensive historical records that can be crucial during audits or legal disputes. Instead of spending valuable time and precious resources on an effort to retrieve and gather documents, COI management software allows organizations to generate reports and documentation on conflicts of interest, actions taken to address them, and compliance activities, providing organizations with evidence to support their compliance efforts and decisions.
Workflow automation
Another automation feature of COI management software is workflow automation. Routing disclosures to compliance officers for review upon their completion removes the need for an employee to do so manually – and it removes the risk of them failing to do so. There are also configurable workflows for different departments or risk levels.
Integrations
The integration of COI management software into the fabric of business operations marks a turning point for any company that exists in a high-regulation industry. The best software solutions facilitate efficiency and organization by seamlessly integrating with businesses’ existing workplace tools, including existing policy management software, HR and compliance systems. ComplianceBridge, for example, continues to improve their products to integrate with tools like Microsoft 365.
Training & Culture
Employee training and comprehension is an important element of analyzing and preventing COIs. Ultimately, the best COI procedures won’t mean anything if a company’s workforce doesn’t understand and comply with guidelines around these kinds of conflicts.
COI management software systems recognize this, educating employees on the dangers posed by conflicts of interest as well as what exactly constitutes a COI, so workers know why, how and when they should disclose. Conflict of interest solutions that encourage education and accountability on every level from every team member in this way help establish a strong ethical throughline around risk in the workplace, encouraging a culture transparency through ethical leadership.
Benefits of Using COI Management Software
Improved Compliance and Risk Mitigation
Since COI software’s oversight capabilities align closely with regulatory requirements, it improves the process for everyone involved, yields more reliable results, fortifies the organization’s stance on compliance, and reduces the risk of legal repercussions and reputational damage.
Time and Resource Savings
COI management software eliminates the burdensome process of hunting down employees on a regular basis for updated disclosures and manually updating spreadsheets. In today’s fast-paced digital world where more processes are automated and machines are doing more of the work that was once done by humans, COI software is no longer simply a competitive edge, but an absolute necessity! It can serve as the distinguishing factor between a company that simply survives and one that thrives.
Transparency and Accountability
By systematically tracking and managing conflicts of interest using COI management software, organizations lift the veil on otherwise opaque operations. Because all employees must fill out the same disclosure forms and all data is stored in a central repository to which all reviewers have access, a standardized COI process establishes clear guidelines, sets expectations, and creates an environment in which employees feel comfortable and confident coming forward with potential conflicts, which exhibits integrity and transparency.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Granting stakeholders, such as employees, investors, and regulatory bodies, visibility into the organization’s COI management processes, COI management software enables organizations to generate reports that give insight into each employee based on their own responses. With full visibility, all can see potential conflicts and make unbiased decisions driven by data, for the ultimate good of the company based on the bottom line.
Mitigating Hidden Risks
Enhanced data analytics features allow you to find those needles in the haystack, identifying obscure relationships that may pose COI risks. By utilizing COI management software, businesses can minimize the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties or legal consequences. Organizations can maintain accurate and up-to-date records of conflicts of interest and the steps taken to address them, which demonstrates due diligence to regulatory authorities.
How to Choose the Right COI Management Software
Choosing the right COI management software is an important decision. It should start with assessing your organization’s needs. Consider the size of your organization, the number of necessary disclosures, as well as the regulatory environment in which you operate. Evaluate the software’s features and scalability to ensure that the software can grow with your organization and compliance requirements. While one software may be great for your organization today, tomorrow it may lack features you wish you had.
Additionally, consider ease of use and integration. Choose an efficient system with a design that centers on user experience and compatibility with existing systems. Select intuitive interfaces with user-friendly dashboards so employees can seamlessly navigate and utilize the software, minimizing the time traditionally spent on training and adaptation. Look for software that continually improves compatibility such as ComplianceBridge, whose software allows collaboration with Google Docs along with Microsoft.
As you vet software systems, verify vendor support is stellar. You want to know that if there are any issues, you have a partner ready to walk with you side by side to resolve them. You want to know that in the early phases of implementation, the vendor will help guide and train your users professionally and effectively. Since you’re working with the personal information of your employees, to avoid compromising sensitive data you need software with beefy security and strong data protection measures.
Try before you buy. Request a demo or trial to get a feel for the software – this is the absolute best way to see if the software is the right fit for your company. Be sure that you can get satisfactory answers to all your questions and concerns. Ensure that you get to see the real working product and test functionality with real workflows before committing.
Make COI Management Software a Cornerstone of Your Organization
If you’re searching for the perfect solution to manage conflicts of interest effectively, ComplianceBridge has you covered. Our powerful and intuitive COI management software is specifically designed to simplify the disclosure and resolution process, adapting seamlessly to the unique needs of your business—no matter its size or complexity.
Creation of assessments, collating responses, performing analysis and generating reports are all handled on our platform with minimal time and effort from your compliance team. With regular COI disclosures you can instantly distribute COI requests and set the frequency (annually or quarterly). Our automated reminders and notifications can be scheduled to continue until employees complete assignments.
With ComplianceBridge, you can quickly create custom questionnaires tailored to your organization’s requirements. You can design unique question sets, which can be simple or complex with various question types including multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, ratings, yes/no and textual responses. You can include conditional questions and reference external documents for a more thorough disclosure process. These question sets can be distributed to specific departments, groups, or locations with ease. Our software also allows businesses to schedule regular disclosure periods, ensuring that every employee stays compliant and no potential conflict is overlooked.
All aspects of the COI disclosure process are saved, recorded and easily accessible to facilitate auditing. You can assign evaluators, authorized parties to review and grade responses. With our COI manager dashboard, you can review and manage responses with the ability to identify trends and export data for additional analysis. You have access to real-time response reporting. We also make it easy to automatically flag certain responses for low compliance and schedule future periods for disclosure or training, all while saving leadership and employees time and effort.
Our state-of-the-art COI management software is engineered to handle the realities of organizational conflict management with features designed for real-world application. It transforms what is typically a reactive process into a strategic, forward-thinking approach, ensuring that managing conflicts of interest becomes a natural part of the organizational rhythm. Utilizing a better system for tracking and managing conflicts of interest today sets your business up for success long into the future.
ComplianceBridge makes it easy to create and coordinate the COI disclosure process from start to finish, giving you valuable insights into conflicts so you can address them before they become an issue. If you’re ready to reap the benefits COI management software can bring to your business, request a demo with ComplianceBridge today!
