What do compliance and border security have in common? More than you might initially think. Try reading Sylvia Longmire’s Border Insecurity. Some of the issues with border security will resonate with compliance professionals. (Hopefully, you don’t have to deal with illegal immigration, human trafficking, terrorism and drug smuggling as the compliance issues at your company.)
One common problem is how you define success.
If there is a rise in the number of successful drug stops. Two things could be happening. You may have your rate of catching traffickers. Instead of finding 50% of the drug crossings, you are now finding 75%. Or there has been an increase in drug crossings and your success rate has stayed the same. It’s almost impossible to know.
The same is true with compliance. If there is a rise in the number of calls to the hotline, is it because more people are reporting, or because there are more incidents? It’s hard to measure success when the goal is prevention.
If the border were completely secure, there would be no apprehensions beyond the border and there would be 100% success in preventing illegal drugs from crossing border. Of course the border cannot be completely secure. Even if the entire length was securely double fenced, illegal crossing could go under the fences through tunnels, or over the fences with aircraft or catapults. (Yes, they really catapult drug packages over the fence.) Bad guys could move through legal crossings and possibly avoid detection. The World Trade Center terrorists came border checkpoints and not through clandestine crossings
Compliance can’t prevent bad things from happening. It can discourage the activity and it can try to detect the activity. Bad people will do bad things and try to get around the controls that prevent them.
There is ethics sprinkled in the book. Few doubt that the prevention of drug smuggling and criminals from crossing the border are very important elements of border security. Economic immigrants are a more nuanced discussion and Longmire does a great job discussing both sides. There is the humanitarian side and the economic side. Longmire’s approach is that it is a distraction. The limited border defense resources should be focused on the very bad things: drugs, criminals, and terrorists.
I found this book to be much better than Longmire’s first book Cartel. That book read like a collection of blog posts pasted together into a book. I received both books from the publisher with the expectation of a review.
