Hyderabad, 12 December 2024: TeamLease RegTech concluded its exclusive roundtable Compliance 3.0: Going Beyond Accidental Compliance in Hyderabad on December 11, 2024. Compliance officers, legal counsel, and company secretaries marked their presence from the industry in an in-depth discussion about the challenges facing India’s expanding regulatory landscape and developing sustainable compliance frameworks. Simplifying the complex ecosystem, creating a compliance-based culture in the organizations, and enabling technological innovation were identified as important steps toward building an effective regulatory ecosystem in the country.
At the length of the discussion, participants deliberated on the key compliance challenges employers face. These include the criminality associated with failure to comply, the complexity of the regulatory framework, a dynamic and fluid compliance environment, highly manual processes, and higher levels of regulatory scrutiny. The Indian regulatory universe is made up of 1,536 acts, which give rise to 69,233 compliances and 6,613 filings. Over 55% (843) of these laws carry imprisonment clauses. 2 out of 5 compliances (26,134) prescribe jail terms for contraventions, and 3 out of 5 can land you in jail for over a year. State-level legislation is responsible for 80% of these clauses. A significant chunk of these originates from labour laws, which account for 68% of imprisonment clauses. It was also highlighted that to make compliance easier, regulators must take the initiative and simplify regulations, cut down on redundancies, and encourage digitisation while maintaining accountability.
According to the discussants, key actionable items included using digital tools and systems to streamline compliance tracking, manage paperless documents, increase transparency, and rationalise overlapping and ambiguous regulations by applying the three-vector framework of rationalisation, digitisation, and decriminalisation. The representatives recognised compliance as a strategic imperative rather than a static function. Although they agreed that compliance requires a lot of resources, non-compliance costs are far more significant.
Compliance is not just staying on the right side of the law but strategic and deliberate choices that align with an organization’s values and long-term goals. This roundtable demonstrated how collaboration, innovation, and leadership can revolutionize compliance from a challenge into a competitive advantage, said TeamLease RegTech CEO and Co-founder Mr. Rishi Agrawal.
