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By Jo Best, 29 August 2003 10:54

NEWS When it comes to dotting the legal I's and crossing the regulatory T's, UK business is falling behind at speed. Research from corporate policy specialists PolicyMatter shows that 79 per cent of companies have no idea whether they're fulfilling their industry legal obligations or not – and half of the firms surveyed hadn't even bothered to check whether their employees had so much as seen the corporate policy document. However, half of those not currently tracking compliance would like to in the future. That's alright then. Despite the compliance black hole currently swallowing businesses, only 18 per cent of companies questioned had actually experienced a compliance breach in the last year. Nathan Millard, employment law specialist and PolicyMatter spokesman, said: “The first problem is keeping abreast of the latest legal and regulatory requirements – a lot of guidelines and corporate policies become ineffective as case law changes and new legislation is introduced. Secondly, organisations are still not taking adequate steps to ensure that they can prove employees are aware of their obligations and have ‘signed-up’ to abide by the firm’s policies." As well as a lack of monitoring, the compliance ignorance is also a result of confusion over which department should look after the issue. While HR, IT or legal departments all have their own compliance matters to tackle, as no one department has the overall mandate for looking after the issue, it gets largely ignored by all three. The most common method of distributing the necessary corporate policy information to employees is the employee handbook at 33 per cent – a method that Millard considers the most ineffective, due to the difficulty of keeping it updated and checking if an employee has read it.