Education about and enforcement of TAB rules governing the use of DEC will be a major focus for TAB in 2007. Towards that end the TAB’s Board of Directors has approved a new comprehensive compliance methodology to be instituted beginning mid January 2007.
The New Compliance Methodology
The new compliance methodology was developed under the auspices of the TAB Audit Process and Procedures Committee and contains two main elements: field auditing and proposal reviews. It also contains an updated procedure for processing complaints related to alleged DEC misuse. Field auditing involves TAB contracted auditors making unannounced visits to a random sample of boards by market to check the plants reported inventory data. Proposal reviews will have TAB soliciting recent proposals from buyer members of TAB for comparison of the DEC’s on the proposals to those listed in the TAB database. Please click here for a detailed explanation.
The process will be evaluated for the next six months and during that time period there will be no sanctions for non-compliance. The cost of implementing these methodologies is built into TAB’s 2007 budget. No additional funding is required at this time.
Building Support for Compliance
Our Audit Policy and Procedures Committee as well as our Membership and Marketing Committee will be hard at work during 2007 working on a plan to secure the highest level of support for compliance. This effort focuses on two primary objectives:
- An educational program to get non-member plants, agencies and clients to join the TAB,and
- A “policing program conducted in partnership with our agency members to insure the proper use TAB DECs in the buy/sell process.
You will hear more about all these efforts in the coming months.
Plant Preparation
To prepare, plants should review the internal systems that generate their proposals and make sure that the DEC’s being used match what is in the current TAB database. Please remember that the only official DEC is what is in the current TAB database. All counts have been updated to current year levels. Under no circumstances are the old DEC’s to be used, even in situations where the plant is disputing a count. Under such circumstances the plant must use the count TAB has supplied them until the count dispute is rectified.
Also plants should review their audit data as it is in TAB’s current database and make any necessary changes based on the criteria set forth in the attached document. Plants will also be expected to respond to any inquiries from TAB relative to What is missing here
In the meantime please contact me with any questions relative to the new compliance methodology.
Thank you for your continued support and my best wishes to you and your family for the Holidays.
Sincerely,
Larry Hennessy
V.P. Audit Policy & Member Services
The Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement, Inc.
271 Madison Avenue, Suite 1504
New York, NY 10016
