ECI E&C Excellence Partner Program

The purpose of the ECI E&C Excellence Partner Program is to provide the ethics & compliance community with access to tools and resources to build the highest quality ethics & compliance programs.

The E&C Excellence Partner Program:

• Is available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations that serve the ethics & compliance or related functions
• Offers an independent third-party resource to help your members or customers assess their E&C programs
• Provides you a resource to help your members or customers better understand the strengths and weaknesses within their E&C programs
• Provides comparative benchmarks across the five core E&C Excellence Principles
• Is an easy to set-up, valued-added program that you can offer to your members or customers

About ECI’s E&C Excellence Program

The E&C Excellence framework and assessment are a community-led initiative by the E&C community and supported by ECI.

In 2016, ECI released Principles & Practices of High-Quality Ethics & Compliance Programs, a report prepared by a Blue Ribbon Panel of prominent ethics and compliance practitioners, academics, white collar and whistleblower attorneys, as well as former enforcement officials. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce underwrote the report.

The report provides details about organizations with ethics & compliance programs that go beyond the minimum standard. The report discusses five core principles:

• Principle 1: Ethics and compliance is central to business strategy.
• Principle 2: Ethics and compliance risks are identified, owned, managed and mitigated.
• Principle 3: Leaders at all levels across the organization build and sustain a culture of integrity.
• Principle 4: The organization encourages, protects and values the reporting of concerns and suspected wrongdoing.
• Principle 5: The organization takes action and holds itself accountable when wrongdoing occurs.

The report also identified specific objectives, practices and pitfalls to avoid that have enabled organizations to raise the bar on ethics & compliance and set themselves apart from their peers.

The History of the High-Quality Program Assessment

In 2018 ECI released the HQP Measurement Framework written by the E&C Program Maturity Model Working Group comprised of E&C practitioners. This report provided a measurement framework as well as specific guidance to allow all organizations, big or small, profit or nonprofit, to assess the effectiveness of their programs based on high-quality program (HQP) elements. The Working Group utilized a methodology based on five levels of maturity to address each of the five HQP principles.

In 2019, ECI released the HQP Assessment Tool, incorporating the work of the Blue Ribbon Panel and HQP Measurement Framework groups to assess the maturity of their ethics and compliance programs. The HQP Assessment Tool:

• Provides five common-sense, east-to-understand principles
• Applies to all organizations across sectors and sizes
• Allows for cross-functional, multi-geographic assessments
• Has an updated question set that aligns with DoJ Guidelines and other best practices
• Provides your member or customer with the foundation for continuous improvement
• Allows your member or customer to benchmark their organization against other E&C programs

• When your organization becomes an E&C Excellence Partner, you will have the opportunity to offer your members or customer access to the E&C Excellence Assessment Tool. The HQP Assessment Tool is applicable for E&C programs of all sizes from small to large multinational operations.
• Upon completion of the assessment, participants:
  • Will receive their results in a comprehensive report that provides detailed analysis of their ethics and compliance maturity level across the five core principles and supporting objectives
  • The report will provide comparative benchmarks against other ethics & compliance programs
  • The report will identity areas of strength as well as areas of opportunity
• The E&C Excellence Partner Program can be structured to provide you, The E&C Excellence Partner, as well as your member or customer with the results of their E&C Excellence assessment.
• Additional ECI services such as culture assessments and training can be added as a service to your member or customer such as a part of the E&C Excellence Partner Program.

For more information contact advisoryservices@ethics.org