Snowed Under by Red Tape

16 Aug Snowed Under by Red Tape

Recently, a client sat me down at a large table in their largest meeting room.

The client was struggling with a number of regulators, taking severe action.

They offered me a cup of tea, which I gratefully accepted. I am a sucker for a nice cup of tea.

They then returned to the room, barely visible behind the stack of paper they were carrying. The paper hit the table with a thud. I looked up to their back. A few visits later, the table was covered in piles of paperwork.

Finally, they looked at me. “Sorry. We told you it was bad.”

Then, they left the room in a hurry.

They didn’t look sorry. They looked relieved.

A few hours later, they returned and asked if I wanted more tea. “I’m so glad you’re still here. We were worried you might just get up and leave when you saw all the paperwork.”

They had been attempting to deal with various Australian regulators on their own or through their lawyers. As is too often the case, both of these approaches simply escalated the situation.

Often, these tense and difficult situations begin with a business making a simple mistake. Over time, the mistake becomes bigger. One day, a regulator discovers it and asks what is going on. From there, in my experience, honesty is the best policy.

However, it can be hard to own up to mistakes. That’s assuming the business realises that it made a mistake.

In this case, the lawyers fought the regulator in Court. The business owners spent large amounts of money paying their lawyers. That didn’t resolve the regulatory issues.

The business owners felt unfairly targeted by regulators. They didn’t really understand why the regulators were targeting them, when “everyone else” in their business area did “the same thing”.

It’s hard to feel hard done by. But it doesn’t change the law. Fighting government can be a financial and emotional black hole. It can also be the death of your business or charity.

I love unravelling these sorts of problems.

Maybe that makes me weird, but I enjoy nothing more than the achievement of sorting through the regulatory maze and finding a solution that works for both the business and government.

Over twenty years in this field, I have always been able to negotiate a solution that works for government and the business owner, individual or charity that is subject to government action.

Sometimes, that also means working with government to change the law. My experience working on legislative change from within government comes in very handy when I’m working with government to make laws better, for example here

For this client, I worked with the business on a simple proposal to address the regulators’ concerns with that business in a realistic timeframe.