Compliance Week 2015: Full Agenda Announced

Good news for all of you looking to firm up your springtime travel plans: we have fresh news on the best compliance and audit conference out there, Compliance Week 2015.

We have just announced our complete agenda and our latest lineup of speakers. I’m especially pleased with the great list of compliance officers who are volunteering to share their time and lessons learned this year. Our agenda will range from hardcore SOX compliance issues, to strategies for effective leadership of compliance teams, to operational challenges such as assessing antitrust risks or working with sales teams.

Compliance Week 2015 will happen May 18-20, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. as always. Our early-bird registration rate expires at the end of this week—so please register soon, because we do want you there. We are expecting 500+ attendees, all talking shop about corporate ethics & compliance for more than two days.

For compliance and audit professionals unfamiliar with the Compliance Week conference, let me start with our basic philosophy. We have no annual theme like you might see elsewhere. Rather, our conference has one mission: to help compliance, audit, and risk professionals understand how to do your jobs better. That’s the only goal Compliance Week has, to help you understand how to master your profession.

We do that by bringing together the best thinkers we can find in corporate compliance, and this year is no exception. We have the heads of compliance, risk, or audit from a huge range of companies: Ford, Boeing, Walmart, Analog Devices, CapitalOne, RockTenn, Kraft Foods, Kroger, 3M, the Haier Group, Continental AG, 21st Century Fox, Kaiser Permanente, PepsiCo, and more. All will be on stage, talking about the challenges they face and the ways they are trying to solve them. All will be in the audience, too, hearing advice from others every bit as much as they are imparting it.

The sessions on our agenda tend to deal with technical issues, operations, or strategy. Here is an early sampling:

Making the Three Lines of Defense Work as a Strategy. The “three lines model” of risk oversight is all the rage these days, including debates online about whether it’s the right one at all. We’ll have the chief audit executive of Analog Devices and the chief compliance officer of Archer Daniels Midland talking about how they’ve implemented the idea.

Assessing Your Risks in Antitrust. This will be one of our more “operational” sessions. The heads of compliance from Tyco International and Continental AG will be on hand telling how they handle this relatively new, but swiftly growing, challenge for most companies.

ICFR Risks in Business Process Re-engineering. This session is a shout-out to compliance officers struggling with the COSO 2013 framework for internal controls, since it strikes at the heart of Principle No. 9: “analyze changes that could significantly affect internal controls.” The head of GRC at Columbia Sportswear, who has wrestled with COSO 2013 for the better part of year, will lead a discussion on that vexing subject.

Becoming the New CCO. This could be one of our most interesting sessions. We have the top compliance executives from Ford Motor Co., MasterCard, and the Haier Group (our first-ever speaker from a Chinese company) talking about how they chart a course as new leaders running a compliance function—and the focus is very much that. How do you lead? How do you know that you’re succeeding?

As I said, those are just a sample. We ultimately will have more than two dozen panel sessions, nearly 30 workshops, and five keynote speakers. (Our keynoters, by the way, include Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division; and Donnie Smith, CEO of Tyson Foods.) We will have our usual “global track” series of workshops on doing business in various markets around the world, and the “regulator chat” series of workshops with various regulators you’re likely to encounter.

All that said, we do still need more help. We have several sessions that still need a panelist, or workshops that need a conversation leader. If you are an in-house compliance or audit executive who sees a subject that’s near and dear to your heart, let us know—email me at mkelly@complianceweek.com, and we can see how to work together.

Otherwise, register as soon as you can, and we look forward to seeing you in Washington later this spring!