compliance

The term compliance describes a company's rule-compliant behavior with regard to legal and regulatory requirements. Compliance is intended to ensure that business risks are identified, assessed and met by implementing technical solutions.

Legal compliance relates equally to the documentation of transactions under commercial law and tax law, but also to security-relevant solutions for electronic communication and, above all, archiving. Relevant guidelines for security conformity can be found in the British Standard BS 7799, the IT Basic Protection Manual of the German Federal Office for InformationSecurity( BSI), in the Principles for Data Access and Verifiability of Digital Documents(GDPdU) and in the Principles for Proper Computerized Accounting Systems(GoBS).

Other directives and laws that take company-specific aspects into account include Basel II, which sets out equity requirements, the International Financial Reporting Standards(IFRSs ) for financial reporting, the German Act on Corporate Control and Transparency (KonTraG), which is intended to improve corporate governance in German companies, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which increases the transparency of financial statements for companies with international operations.

In the event of non-compliance with the specified rules and guidelines, the companies and organizations bear the legal and financial risk, known as compliance risk.