At the Compliance Week 2016 conference earlier this year, I learned of an NGO that credited its compliance program with saving lives during a bombing incident in the Middle East. Because the group’s compliance team enforced its premise’s security protocols to the letter, when a bomb went off near the office, all employees were protected from an event that otherwise would have produced casualties.
This was just one of many presentations and conversations that showed me how compliance, as a discipline and as a profession, is no longer just something that prevents trouble for large, public companies in highly regulated industries. It has become something with a much broader application, with much broader implications.
