It is our great pleasure to introduce you to the inaugural edition of Compliance Elliance Journal, also known as CEJ. This project has been a labor of love over the past year and we are excited to publish some thought-provoking works. But before we present the pieces, we would like to introduce CEJ and share our vision. We initially began our collaboration through our academic work in developing crosscultural educational programs. Along the way, we realized that we shared a mutual interest, research, and scholarship in the area of compliance and ethics. Correspondingly, we decided that an open-access journal would be a fitting way to expand our vision of making the global compliance dialogue more easily accessible. It is our sincere wish to create an atmosphere encouraging the exchange of ideas between business and legal practitioners, academics, and students from around the world while also creating a platform to combine practical solutions to problems facing the compliance industry with scientific findings.

It gives us great pleasure to introduce you to our fourth edition of the Compliance Elliance Journal (CEJ). We are particularly pleased of a significant innovation, which accompanies our new edition. From now on the CEJ has an Advisory Board, consisting of Derek Six (Compliance Manager at DAW Group, Germany), Marcus Traut (Attorney at and Owner of Anwaltskanzlei Marcus Traut, Germany) and Kenneth Tung (Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at In-Gear Legalytics Limited, China). We are glad that they are willing to support CEJ by their pushing ideas, suggestions and contributions. Thank you for deciding to join CEJ.

It gives us great pleasure to introduce you to our fourth edition of the Compliance Elliance Journal (CEJ).

In this edition, we take a closer look at compliance in the healthcare industry, and focus on questions arising from the fast-growing healthcare compliance system. Our first set of articles explicitly deals with that issue.

In this edition, we take a closer look at compliance in the healthcare industry, and focus on questions arising from the fast-growing healthcare compliance system. Our first setof articles explicitly deals with that issue.

The meaning of Corporate Governance is all values and principles guiding or regulating good and responsible business management. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for managing compliance, risks and checks is the prerequisite for the latter. For that reason, a compliance management system was set up at the University Hospital Frankfurt in 2015.

This piece describes the journey of a student on a LawWithoutWalls ("LWOW") team that was charged with helping a large multinational defense firm, Lockheed Martin, solve this problem. This piece is not designed to teach the reader about supply chain management; instead, it will exemplify through a real-life experience how tough it is to teach people who are not compliance experts about the field’s complexities and, further, explore the difficulty in developing creative, practicable solutions to compliance problems.

German companies or German-based subsidiaries of international businesses may become subject of, or otherwise involved in, investigations by German or foreign regulatory or law enforcement authorities. In the context of such investigations, it is not unusual for the concerned company to face informal requests from German or foreign regulatory and law enforcement authorities for voluntary cooperation. Oftentimes, such requests focus on the transfer of electronic data for investigatory purposes, and such data typically relate, in whole or in part, to individuals (e.g. employees, suppliers and customers). In these and other cases, compliance of German companies or German-based subsidiaries with informal requests from regulatory and law enforcement authorities may itself entail a compliance risk or even constitute a breach by the corporate entity of the German data protection laws resulting in criminal prosecution, administrative sanctions, or damage claims and other actions by third party individuals. This article outlines the scope of application of the German Federal Data Protection Act, introduces the applicable statutory provisions, and discusses the relevant considerations in the context of an informal request by a regulatory or law enforcement authority for voluntary cooperation in the context of global investigations, in particular where a German-based entity faces requests from authorities abroad.

In light of the demanding requirements inherent to the operation of a university hospital, a multitude of compliance risks are entailed in the medical care, training, and research entail which such institutions are engaged in. If such risks materialize, the public will notice, which will substantially tarnish not only the public’s confidence in the proper functioning and the integrity of the impacted hospital, but ultimately, the whole German health care system. In examining the structural and requisite prevention protocols, three risk groups can be distinguished. The Düsseldorf University Hospital provides a leading example in the area of compliance management.

Conflicts of interest (COI) in healthcare have increasingly gained attention in the lay press as well as among healthcare professionals. COIs increase the risk of undue influence on professional decision making and may have far-reaching consequences in healthcare. Therefore, it is essential to develop strategies to deal with such risk situations in order to prevent negative outcomes for patients and the health care system. This article describes recent research on COIs in Germany as well as initiatives aiming at more transparency and better management of COIs in Germany.