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Growing global concerns about
environmental, social and ethical
issues are changing the regulatory
climate in electronics industries,
and the impact of these issues
on corporate policy and strategic
decision making has grown in kind.
In the RF/microwave industry,
environmental standards such as
RoHS and Reach have long been
givens for most off-the-shelf parts,
while more recent regulatory
requirements
have
included
documentation and disclosure of
responsible sourcing of conflict
minerals, and now reporting
requirements for corporate social
responsibility or “CSR.”
The goals of these regulations
are noble, and the social value of
preventing environmental pollution,
human rights abuses, and other
forms of unethical business conduct
is self-evident. However, what
is less clear is the effectiveness
The Growing Impact of Compliance
in the RF/Microwave Supply Base
Arthur Ackerman, Vice President of Quality, Mini-Circuits
of new and existing regulatory
requirements in realizing those
underlying goals. Driven in large
part by new legislation, rising levels
of shareholder activism among
public companies, and consequent
pressure up the supply chain,
companies have assumed greater
responsibility in addressing some
of today’s most challenging social,
economic, and environmental
problems. Unfortunately in the
cases of regulations currently in
place for the electronics industry, the
ideal of social and political reform
through flow-down regulation of
global business is lost in the practical
details of administering those
regulations at the ground level.
As regulatory requirements increase
in number and complexity, as they
have in the cases of Conflict Minerals
and CSR, companies incur high
costs associated with management
systems, legal reviews, data
management platforms, and due
diligence activities. These activities
add significant administrative burden
to operations, but no direct value to
the products and services being sold
to the customer. At the same time,
evidence demonstrating the social
benefits of these programs has
been vague or absent altogether,
and their efficacy has been met with
skepticism by policy experts
Advocacy efforts by industry
groups, most notably the IPC, have
led US regulators to reconsider the
effectiveness of such disclosure
and reporting requirements. On
April 7th, acting SEC chairman Mike
Piwowar released a statement citing
IPC comments relaxing enforcement
of its conflict minerals rule,
suspending requirements of costly
due diligence reviews and audits.
In a speech to the Economic Club of
New York on July 12th, SEC chair, Jay
Clayton remarked that lawmakers
28 l New-Tech Magazine Europe