Accelerated Regulatory Submissions
If your association reports to a regulatory governing body, you may be required to submit certain mandated information to that overseeing entity at established intervals or triggers. While it can seem tedious to ensure your compliance, in a lot of ways, being held to certain regulations presents a fantastic opportunity for excellence. Regulations or standards are typically created as a baseline that must be met to continue operating within or servicing a particular sector. However, the intention is for those who fall under the regulations to push beyond the baseline and raise the bar high above what the standards require.
All that said, ensuring your association complies is still an effort that must be made – on top of all the other efforts required to effectively and efficiently manage your community and its members. Fortunately, filing information to regulatory bodies to ensure your association remains compliant doesn’t have to be an arduous task. Your AMS should lighten the load by empowering your regulatory submissions digitally.
Here are some of the ways an AMS should be able to make your regulatory submissions something to appreciate, instead of something to dread.
- Don’t Submit Manually
- There’s no shortage of reasons why doing most anything manually, these days, makes little to no sense. Especially when we’re talking about paperwork. Your solution shouldn’t be forcing you and your administrators outside its bounds – being made to collect up a bunch of information and have it represented in a series of physical submission forms. On one hand, submitting manually is inefficient and fraught with the potential for human error. On the other, it’s a completely unnecessary drain on time. Simply put, it’s an exercise that just shouldn’t have to occur. The AMS platform you select should be adaptable enough that it can be customized to automate whatever regulatory submission your association is subject to. This way, administrators will not be required to extract certain information from the system or place pen to paper and fill out form after form. Instead, your AMS will do the grunt work on behalf of your association, and the regulator will get exactly what they need – all with little effort required from your administrators.
- Why Wait?
- This is a foregone conclusion, but a manual submission of any type of information will always take longer than a digital submission. More often than not, it will not only take longer – it will take substantially longer. It’s true that patience is a virtue, but you shouldn’t have to wait to complete an important submission because of logistical slow downs. When your submissions are setup digitally, the process is immediate. So, instead of having to plan for and contend with unnecessary delays, you’re accomplishing full and confirmed submissions without having to conduct any tedious manual effort. It just doesn’t make sense having to wait when there is technology available that will completely eliminate any wait time.
- Improve Your Standing
- When you conduct regulatory submissions manually, you’re leaving your association’s compliance in the hands of a lot of people who have no vested interest in whether or not you comply. A manual submission has to pass through many hands before it gets to its intended recipient – leaving your submission exposed to a variety of pitfalls. What’s more, let’s just grant that your submission arrives at its intended destination in the planned amount of time, you’re creating a lot of work for the regulator who receives your submission package. Reason being, it’s physical documentation, instead of digital. This means they have to pay mind and take time to keep the package organized and uncluttered. They will, of course, do what needs to be done on their end to ensure your submission is fully filed. However, they will associate a different sentiment to a physical submission than they will to a digital one. Both will still get submitted, but the regulator won’t be able to help their preference for dealing with submissions done digitally. After all, a digital submission empowers the regulator to do their job better – which will give them a positive relationship with your association’s submissions. Being able to directly submit to the regulator (without swapping through many hands), and setting up the regulator for success as they process your submission will certainly have a positive impact on your standing and ability to comply as a whole.
- Prevent Fraud
- It’s unfortunate, but true nonetheless – people want to get their hands on your information, no matter what it is, for nefarious reasons. When you submit your compliance documentation manually, it doesn’t go directly from your secure environment to the regulator’s. You’re placing your trust in every pair of hands that has to physically transfer it from your location, to the regulator’s. Much of the time, things may go off without a hitch. However, all it takes is one time for your information to land in the wrong hands and be used in an unauthorized and unintended way for your association’s credibility to be tarnished. Why would you expose yourself to the liability of fraudulent or exploitative use of your information when there’s no need to do so? By submitting your compliance package to the regulator digitally and directly, you’re cutting out the need for many people to have access to the information. In submitting this way, you are doing more to prevent breaches of your information and reducing the level of exposure every time you need to submit.
- Lead by Example
- As an association, you should be striving to be (or remain) a leader within your respective industry. As a leader, you’ll be pushing the boundaries far beyond compliance. Complying with the regulations is just the bare minimum. However, you may preach (within your industry) how important it is to stay within regulations. That said, you need to practice what you preach – unequivocally. For all of the above reasons and to maintain your image as a respected entity within your market, your association should submit your compliance information digitally and directly, via your AMS. It’s the most sure-fire way to all but guarantee your submission efforts go off without incident.
As an association that reports to a regulatory body, you definitely want to remain compliant and in good standing with the regulator. There’s no need to leave things up to chance by putting your information out there – potentially exposing it to misplacement, delay or compromise. Get control over your regulatory submissions by creating a direct line between your association and your regulator, via your AMS.
Guild has provided many of its clients with the ability to directly submit compliance documents to their respective regulatory body via our AMS solution. If you’d like to learn more about this functionality, please click here.
