I field many questions from my perch as editor of Compliance Week, but one trumps all the others. It varies from person to person, but inevitably it runs along the lines of: “I'm looking for some information about how other companies manage their compliance departments. Can you help me?”

Well, at long last, this spring Compliance Week and PwC are going to provide an authoritative answer.

The two of us have allied our forces to create and conduct a comprehensive new study of how corporations manage their compliance functions—the State of Compliance annual survey. In this, our inaugural year, we intend to collect and compare data from senior compliance officers at U.S. companies to gain perspective on how the compliance function is changing and evolving over time. Future State of Compliance surveys (yes, we're going to do this every year) will then provide a lens into the changing practice of compliance risk management over time.

A good idea, right? Everyone is always clamoring for more data to benchmark your compliance function against your peers, so you can better understand what your risks are, how your reporting relationships should work, what skills your department needs, and even what your compensation should be. The State of Compliance survey will fill that need.

But if we're going to do this, we need your help. We need compliance officers to take the survey, and supply us the data.

You can find the survey here:

http://www.globalbestpractices.com/compliance2011


The survey is free, and hosted by PwC on a safe, secure website. Your data will also be anonymous, and reported to Compliance Week in aggregate; even I won't know which company submitted what responses. Yes, you'll need to create a PwC account name and password, and the survey itself will take 20 to 30 minutes to complete. That's a significant bit of time, I know, but consider the information we're looking to collect:
  • Structure: how long your company has had a chief compliance officer, where the CCO falls in reporting structures, what else the compliance function oversees (audit, risk management, financial reporting), and how compliance reports up to the board of directors;
  • Focus: what duties the compliance department is responsible for, what risks your company worries about, and where those risks come from;
  • Effectiveness: what key metrics you use to measure risks and the effectiveness of your compliance program, how you link compliance to compensation, and how you measure the return on investment in your department (if you can do that at all);
  • Resources: the size of your budget, the skills your compliance employees have, the skills they don't have, and more.

You can take the survey any time from now through Monday, March 21. The results will be announced first at our Compliance Week 2011 annual conference in May, where I will review the findings with Joe Atkinson, leader of PwC's governance, risk and compliance practice, as well as two compliance officers who served on the advisory board that helped us craft the survey.

After that debut, the complete results will be published in a special supplement with our July print magazine, and PwC will provide each participating company with a report that compares its specific results to the company's peer group—a nifty bit of intelligence, especially considering that it comes at no charge.

Miles Everson, global and U.S. risk and compliance leader at PwC and one of the most thoughtful folks I've met in my time following compliance, probably put it best: “The ability to report individual company data alongside industry and sector benchmarks is a critical aspect of this study,” he said. “This capability allows companies to do more than look at broad-based averages; it allows a company to easily benchmark its organization against peer companies in its specific industry or sector.”

That's absolutely right; our community is starving for benchmarking data. The State of Compliance survey seeks to end that, but we need your help. So please, take the survey, give us good data, and stay tuned—we should have some very interesting results for you in about four months.