How safe and secure do your employees feel? They might be harassed or threatened by co-workers or visitors or exposed to some other type of workplace violence. Or maybe your CEO has received threats from a customer dissatisfied with your organization’s product or service. From protecting C-suite to entry level employees, you must be committed to security as a 24/7 objective.

Especially if your organization or CEO is high profile, a security assessment must look at security across the enterprise, in areas such as transportation, private residences, personal protection, and other activities related to your executive protection (EP) operations and corporate security program. That’s when the assessment becomes the foundation of an independent security study (ISS). Not only does an ISS protect your employees, but it also evaluates EP and corporate security and how well you identify, assess, and manage threats to individuals and the organization itself. Plus, the ISS allows your organization’s leadership to avoid unnecessary tax liability as it relates to executive protection.

Corporate executives can receive extraordinary fringe benefits that are not provided to other employees. The IRS considers any property or service that an executive receives in addition to regular taxable wages as a fringe benefit that may be subject to taxation. Therefore, a fringe benefit provided in connection with the performance of services, regardless of its form, must be treated as compensation included in income. Whether a particular fringe benefit is taxable depends on if a specific statutory exclusion applies to the benefit.

Benchmarking, United States Secret Service, and IRS compliance—a dynamic trio.

Your EP might include air travel, airport protection, ground transportation, and a traveling protective detail to ensure the safety of company executives, especially if they travel internationally. The IRS taxes the gross income of those executives for these transportation security costs—unless you can show a bona fide business-oriented security concern for the protection provided. An ISS fulfills IRS statutory requirements to avoid this tax, saving your CEO and other executives money.

Does the CEO travel to countries with known terrorist activity? Does a driver transport the CEO from home to work and back and to business events? Does the CEO travel by private plane? The ISS dives deeply into your EP operations to document current measures and offers industry best practices to mitigate threats and strengthen overall security.

By working with The Lake Forest Group, you benefit from our extensive experience. Because of our varied client list, we benchmark your operations with best practices in a variety of industries so you can learn from organizations you would rarely have contact with otherwise. And as we assess your corporate security program and specifically EP operations, we rely on Mike’s experiences as a Secret Service agent who protected the President and First Lady on the Presidential Protective Detail, investigated threats to the President, and identified risk in a variety of locations, circumstances, and appearances.

Leveraging the USSS methodology in your ISS, The Lake Forest Group evaluates your:

• EP operations, including drivers, vehicles, corporate or private aircraft, airport locations and personnel, risk level where the executive travels, advance and traveling details, and any additional activities designed to safeguard your CEO and select executives.
• Physical, technical, procedural, and personnel security at corporate, residential, and transportation-related properties.
• Coordination with internal stakeholders including administrative, HR, facilities, security, finance, and legal to maximize communication and risk management effectiveness across departments.
• Cooperation with external stakeholders to support security initiatives, including local first responders, open source and social media analysts, and response monitoring station personnel.

You can’t conduct the study yourself—that’s why it’s independent.

An important part of the IRS compliance is that the study must be done by an outsider—that’s why it’s independent. In other words, you can’t conduct your own assessment. The net result of the ISS conducted by an independent consultant is an evaluation of your personnel, programs, policies, technologies, operations, and current security environment to identify areas of strength along with opportunities for improvement.

A holistic strategy guarantees your security is greater than the sum of its parts.

As we conduct the ISS, we look at each element of your security environment at corporate properties, private residences of executives, and locations, equipment, and personnel that support air and ground transportation. Because each part of EP is intrinsically interrelated with another and EP in turn is inherently connected to physical, technical, procedural, and personnel security measures at every location and in every function, your holistic security strategy protects your executives as well as your employees.

The ISS ensures that holistic security strategy as we offer strategic considerations to enhance existing measures. It also complies with IRS requirements to validate employer-provided transportation for business-oriented security concerns and overall security programs and specifically exclude those costs and items from the executive’s gross income, which decreases tax liability. 

That’s a lot. Where do you begin? With your right first step.

We could write volumes about the importance of an ISS—we didn’t even mention security training for your employees, emergency management and active shooter plans, or a workplace violence mitigation program. You need them all to provide a safe and secure workplace so everyone can do their best work.

Your first step is the right step—and reaching out to us is your right first step. Contact us today!