When you’re looking into improving your compliance training courses, you have probably come across articles talking about compliance officers and the growing demand in organizations worldwide. But what does a compliance officer do, and do you need to hire one?
Besides implementing online platforms like True Office Learning, it’s also worth hiring a compliance officer to provide insight and collect data to keep the company compliant. Learn more about what a compliance officer does and its importance in your organization.
What is a Compliance Officer?
Compliance offers are those responsible for ensuring a company fulfills all its duties under applicable laws and regulations. These officers would identify and mitigate risks, ensure compliance, and conduct compliance audits. Moreover, they also coordinate, review, and update existing policies and adhere to any regulatory reporting guidelines.
With that definition in mind, there are two points to note of.
First, a compliance officer is in charge of ensuring a company can fulfill its duties and not for doing such duties directly. Usually, someone else in the company should perform those duties. The job of a compliance officer is to ensure that all policies, training, and tools to do all the work are set in place.
Second, a compliance officer ensures that a company can fulfill its duties, not that it will perfectly fulfill such duties every time. A company will most likely not fulfill its duties perfectly. At one point, an employee can commit a mistake, which is fine (to an extent). Regulators are forgiving as long as they know a company made good faith decisions and continuously focused on compliance.
Basically, compliance officers help a company take its compliance duties very seriously.
Do You Need a Compliance Officer?
Yes, you need a compliance officer, especially if you are a large company! To correctly answer why let’s imagine a situation where a company operates without one.
That company’s executives and employees will most likely want to operate an ethical company, with groups doing their best to abide by the law and regulations, acting ethically.
However, when you leave business departments managing their own compliance affairs, it’s like leaving medical specialists to care for patients without the primary care doctor. Everyone means well, and the patient can receive good treatment for specific ailments. But that patient won’t receive a holistic sense of how healthy he is, and he may have to spend so much more on unnecessary treatments or co-pays.
Think of the patient as the company and the medical specialists as the people within the company. Without a compliance officer, things become undisciplined, scattershot, and expensive in the long run. Sure, some things will run effectively, but there will be many more areas that end up resulting in non-compliance, sometimes without knowing.
Wrapping It Up
Now that you are more aware of a compliance officer’s importance, it may be time to consider hiring one seriously.
