Here's how you can proactively detect and resolve conflicts of interest with senior stakeholders.

Something that I believe is more effective than trying to manage the constantly varying and evolving circumstances for each stakeholder is to ensure you are training stakeholders to understand the importance of identifying and addressing conflicts of interest. Certainly you want to use questionnaires to ensure full and complete disclosure of relationships and circumstances that are needing to be addressed, but by ensuring stakeholders understand the importance of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety you will add the additional mitigation for your stakeholders to “police themselves” and develop a forum for full discussion of areas of interests that may even go beyond the legal and regulatory requirements.

As with all policies that arise from a legal/regulatory framework, I believe companies have a real opportunity to reinforce their culture and restate their mission and values in how they set compliance boundaries with regards to conflicts of interest. Is the company wanting to set minimum standards, or are they looking to confirm a commitment to operate "above reproach" and ensure transparency in addressing real and potential conflicts of interest that can be extremely damaging to a corporate brand if they are not realized before an embarrassing public disclosure.

Something that I think goes a long way towards not only establishing a culture of compliance but, as importantly, demonstrates an environment of transparency is to establish informal communications (email, newsletter, etc.) that include reminders on elements of the program which benefit from ongoing monitoring (insider trading, conflicts of interest) AND necessitate updated information from participants. You can then use more formal communications (quarterly certifications) for elements that have episodic representations from the company to the general public.

Another important factor to use to encourage disclosure is the realization that the occurrence of a conflict of interest can result in MULTIPLE parties being put in the spotlight. If it’s a relationship with a family member, it could impact them as well…if with another company you are affiliated with, they will need to be involved. The opportunity to understand the breadth of potential conflicts of interest should be something that is front of mind for both the company and its stakeholders. This is one of those areas where it isn’t just the company that may be negatively impacted by a failure to comply with the requirements.

In my experience, if you need to have a "neutral party" review the situation and make a judgment between the Company and an interested party then you have problems much bigger than a potential conflict of interest! The policies and procedures for handling conflicts of interest should, first and foremost, be clear and transparent for all parties and, as importantly, it should be understood to be in the best interest of all parties to avoid such situations.

In addition to having the company regularly review its practices, I suggest a reach out to participants to gauge how they feel the company had done in training, communicating, and "living" the relevant practices.