Description:

Our 6th annual study will provide compliance executives the benchmarking data they need to understand common industry practices today and to plan for more effective, more efficient compliance operations in the future. This year, 817 compliance executive from a wide range of company types responded to our survey, providing a comprehensive view of the compliance function in a wide variety of organizational settings.

We focused our 2016 study on the strategic elements of compliance programs, which set the stage for both a culture of compliance and ethics and management programs to assist the organization in conforming to regulatory requirements and ethical standards. Without strong alignment of compliance management to business strategy, it is difficult to efficiently integrate compliance into business processes or assess the effectiveness of compliance efforts against strategic objectives.

Topics to be covered include:

•	Tone at the top – How senior leadership demonstrates personal and organizational commitment to compliance and the compliance and ethics program and how this commitment permeates all levels of management.

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Risk assessment – How often companies conduct formal assessments of their compliance and ethics risk areas, how these assessments are integrated, if at all, into enterprise-wide risk assessments, and how the results of these evaluations support the identification of the ownership and management of compliance risks.

•	Oversight and responsibility – How companies define oversight responsibilities and accountability for their compliance and ethics program through the Board of Directors, a designated compliance function, a compliance committee and members of senior leadership.