New regulations and security initiatives .........................................
Have you been hassled at airport security checkpoints recently? Taking off
your shoes, getting rid of nail clippers, and having the contents of your luggage
rifled through became common after September 11, 2001. But the terrorist
attacks also meant increased inspections on the import and export of goods.
Governments around the world enacted new regulations and security initia-
tives in the wake of the attacks. The United States and other countries have
tried to ensure dangerous materials that could be used to make bombs or
other weapons aren’t shipped to terrorists. Therefore, companies shipping
abroad need special licenses from the government to ship certain products.
Governments also restrict certain goods, such as firearms, from being
shipped to certain people or organizations. The act of managing the export
or import of these controlled goods is known as “product-level compliance.”
Governments also issue outright bans on shipping anything to certain indi-
viduals or groups, such as terrorist-related organizations. The act of manag-
ing and monitoring all the people and entities in the supply chain is known as
“party-level compliance.” To make things more complicated, there are more
than 50 different “restricted party” lists that various governments and gov-
ernment agencies have developed and update on a daily basis.
Violations of these regulations can result in large fines and even jail time for
company executives (see the “$100 million export fine” sidebar elsewhere in
this chapter for more information). President Bush recently signed into law
an amended version of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act
Leading Exporters in World Merchandise Trade, 2006
1112.0
1036.3
968.9
649.9
490.4
462.4
446.3
410.6
389.5
369.2
Germany
USA
China
Japan
France
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Belgium
Figure 8-3:
Top 10
exporters
(Data
source:
World Trade
Organi-
zation).
144 Part II: Diving into GRC
