ENFORCING COMPLIANCE ON BUSINESS PROCESSES THROUGH THE USE OF PATTERNS

In the past recent years, business process compliance has become an area of significant concern to many organizations. Despite an increasing number of methods and tools, organizations are still facing difficulties in finding effective support to ensure that their business processes comply with the requirements set forth by regulations, laws, standards, etc. While manual solutions offer limited assurance for compliance, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework for semi-automatically managing compliance requirements and ensuring compliance throughout all the phases of business process lifecycle. One of the foundational building blocks of such a framework is a generic conceptual model that supports factoring compliance and its relation to business processes. This paper introduces a compliance conceptual model to capture and manage compliance requirements and to relate them to business processes in a transparent and verifiable manner. The model also incorporates a set of patterns to facilitate the specification of formal compliance rules to be used for automated compliance verification and monitoring. We have developed a set of integrated tools that supports our framework and partially validated the framework in two case studies involving industry companies

International Trade: Rules of Origin

[Excerpt] Determining the country of origin of a product is important for properly assessing tariffs, enforcing trade remedies (such as anti-dumping and countervailing duties) or quantitative restrictions (tariff quotas), and statistical purposes. Other commercial trade policies are also linked with origin determinations, such as country of origin labeling and government procurement regulations. Rules of origin (ROO), used to determine the country of origin of merchandise entering the U.S. market, can be very simple, noncontroversial tools of international trade as long as all of the parts of a product are manufactured and assembled primarily in one country. However, when a finished product’s component parts originate in many countries, as is often the case in today’s global trading environment, determining origin can be a very complex, sometimes subjective, and time-consuming process. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the agency responsible for determining country of origin using various ROO schemes. Non-preferential rules of origin are used to determine the origin of goods imported from countries with which the United States has most-favored-nation (MFN) status. They are the principal regulatory tools for accurate assessment of tariffs on imports, addressing country of origin labeling issues, qualifying goods for government procurement, and enforcing trade remedy actions and trade sanctions. Preferential rules are used to determine the eligibility of imported goods from certain U.S. free trade agreement (FTA) partners and certain developing country beneficiaries to receive duty-free or reduced tariff benefits under bilateral or regional FTAs, trade preference programs (such as the Generalized System of Preferences), and other special import programs. Preferential rules of origin are specific to each FTA, which means that they vary from agreement to agreement and preference to preference. This report deals with ROO in three parts. First, we describe in more detail the reasons that country of origin rules are important and briefly describe U.S. laws and methods that provide direction in making these determinations. Second, we discuss briefly some of the more controversial issues involving rules of origin, including the apparently subjective nature of some CBP origin determinations, and the effects of the global manufacturing process on ROO. Third, we conclude with some alternatives and options that Congress could consider that might assist in simplifying the process. This report will be updated as events warrant

Corporate Social Responsibility and the "Game of Catallaxy": The Perspective of Constitutional Economics

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become not only a growing subject in business schools and in academic as well as public discourse more generally, the CSR-movement has grown into a major industry providing a profitable niche for a variety of non-profit organizations. The literature devoted to CSR can fill libraries, and sorting out the variety of arguments that academic researchers on, and political advocates of, corporate social responsibility have advanced is a Sisyphean task. The purpose of this paper is to identify and examine some of the more fundamental arguments by approaching the matter from the perspective of constitutional economics. The focus of my analysis will be on the issue that Milton Friedman (1970) has raised in a famous essay that has become a catalyst in the debate on CSR and by far the most often quoted paper in this debate. Restating an argument made earlier in his Capitalism and Freedom Friedman noted in this essay: "In a free-enterprise, private-property system a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers." --

Order Without Judges: Customary Adjudication

Scholarship on custom and law has largely focused on the creation and enforcement of informal rules, demonstrating and in some cases endorsing the existence of order without law. But creating and enforcing rules are only two of the three functions of governance, corresponding roughly with what in other contexts are called the legislative and executive branches. The third function—adjudication—has not played such a prominent role in the scholarly literature on informal governance. As one leading scholar puts it: Custom has no constitution or judges. But if customs can be created and enforced by nonstate actors, why should scholars assume that formal (that is, noncustomary) courts are the only institutions that do or should adjudicate those customs? This Essay seeks to describe and emphasize the role of customary adjudication, the third branch of customary governance. In doing so, it has three main goals: first, to argue that customary governance can be understood in terms of the same three functions familiar to students of formal governance; second, to deliver a preliminary and tentative account of the third of these branches; and finally, to suggest that existing scholarship on custom and law has given comparatively little attention to the functions and forms of customary adjudication. If successful, those contributions should set the stage for future descriptive and normative work

Cities, The Sharing Economy and What's Next

This report seeks to provide an analysis of what is currently happening in American cities so that city leaders may better understand, encourage and regulate the growing sharing economy. Interviews were conducted with city officials on the impact of the sharing economy and related topics, and the report centers around five key themes: innovation, economic development, equity, safety and implementation.The sharing economy is also commonly referred to as collaborative consumption, the collaborative economy, or the peer-to-peer economy. This term refers to business models that enable providers and consumers to share resources and services, from housing to vehicles and more. These business models typically take the form of an online and/or application-based platform for business transactions

International Trade: Rules of Origin

[Excerpt] Recent trade policy issues have pointed to the framework used by the United States and other countries to regulate imports, including the process of determining country of origin using “rules of origin” (ROO). Such rules can be very simple, noncontroversial tools of international trade as long as all of the parts of a product are manufactured and assembled primarily in one country. However, when a finished product’s component parts originate in many countries—as is often the case in today’s global trading environment—determining origin can be a very complex, sometimes subjective, and time-consuming process. This report first provides a general overview of the U.S. ROO system, including its implementation as it applies to manufactured imports. Second, advantages and disadvantages of the ROO schemes as implemented by the United States are also discussed. Third, the report illustrates ways in which the application of the rules of origin system can lead to country of origin determinations that could be inconsistent with U.S. policy objectives or goals, or encourage businesses to circumvent them. The report concludes with some options that Congress could consider in order to improve the ROO process

Post Claims Underwriting and Rescission Practices

Based on case studies in four states, examines the effectiveness of regulation of the individual health insurance market and consumer protections against insurers canceling, rescinding, or limiting coverage after claims are submitted. Recommends reforms