International Compliance Codes: Reflections on Their Significance

This Article explores the significance of international compliance codes. After describing compliance and reviewing compliance program activities and structures that have become the standard compliance mode, it looks at major U.S. and international compliance codes that helped establish and reinforce that model. It then explores reasons for the successful international diffusion of compliance, as evidenced by the international compliance codes. It particularly highlights that the compliance codes have followed a well-trodden path of international codes of business practices, which is to present them as a kind of neutral business technology. It discusses the main reason for this presentation, academic criticism of it, and the persistence of this approach despite that criticism. It observes that compliance practitioners in large international organizations have an interest in embracing the codes, which validate their own position and role in their organization. The Article offers additional reflections on the success of and the lack of opposition to the international compliance codes. It particularly emphasizes that compliance practices presented as a neutral, technical kind of expertise could serve any social or economic purpose in a given local setting, which allows compliance to be embraced in countries with different cultural and economic orientations. The Article concludes by observing that, while the international compliance codes raise the issue about the convergence of compliance practices, through their success and generality they may obscure differences in compliance orientations in countries.