All organizations need to consider the laws and standards set by regulatory bodies when designing internal workflows, as the penalty for violations is fairly high: severe fines and, in some cases, imprisonment.
The first step is always adhering to regional, national, and international laws, but don’t forget about a similarly important task: compliance tracking and reporting.
What Is Corporate Compliance Reporting?
As its name suggests, compliance reporting is the act of jotting down how your business is aligning with government rules and regulations. These reports show the company where its compliance efforts are going and how well it’s following legal requirements.
In addition to being used for your own reference, these reports are often requested by governmental bodies for auditing purposes. Creating them also holds individual departments accountable for themselves and assures everyone involved that the organization is doing its best to stay compliant.
When the management designs a compliance reporting system, it first carefully reads these regulations before establishing a formal set of rules to implement across the business. It then generates reports based on how well those rules are followed, which show:
- What areas need attention
- Where the risks are
- How to make future business decisions
Reports can come in many forms—including financial, cybersecurity, and technical—and can apply to different parts of the business. The IT security team, for instance, handles cybersecurity compliance and reports on the digital security of consumer data.
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Who Is Responsible For Compliance Reporting?
Larger organizations typically have a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) at the helm of generating useful reports. Smaller businesses usually designate the responsibility to another staff member, such as an IT professional or a legal department representative.
Once created, reports usually go to an external auditor. In terms of internal use, a stakeholder or a manager might read these reports to determine how to make changes to internal processes for better compliance in the future.
Different Compliance Reporting Requirements For Various Industries
Almost all companies need to have compliance reporting procedures, though the exact regulations to account for differ depending on the industry. The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples.
- Healthcare organizations must follow the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). One of the most well-known rules on it is the privacy act that protects the medical information of individual patients, especially electronic records.
- Retail must follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for processing payments over credit cards.
- Energy companies often use the North American Reliability Corporation’s NERC framework.
- European businesses must follow the data privacy regulations set by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union.
It can be difficult to keep track of all the rules and laws that apply to your business, so what’s the best option for modern companies dealing with a vast amount of compliance data?
Compliance Reporting Automation
As regulations become more complex and change over time, it is notoriously difficult to keep your reporting procedures efficient. Smaller and medium-sized businesses with limited IT staff have issues handling all that data manually, and even larger companies are looking for a more cost-effective method without compromising on data quality and accuracy.
Online tools are now available specifically to address this previously manual process. Today, companies can automate and orchestrate these workloads through tools like ITSM platforms.
Here are just a few of the advantages to these platforms:
- Machines can process data much faster and with no errors. Valuable insights can be generated faster and with less lead time this way.
- Businesses can achieve continuous compliance thanks to the real-time nature of the analysis.
- Automated compliance reporting solutions can also alert management of risks and help adjust procedures accordingly.
- Standardizing reporting practices is now possible, which improves accuracy and efficiency in the process.
- Automated compliance reporting solutions can also generate graphs and charts instantly for easy analysis and allow users who are less technical to operate everything over a convenient dashboard.
Automated reporting solutions aren’t intended to replace your compliance team. They rather help you work more efficiently and give you more confidence in your abilities to control legal compliance and effect corrective action whenever necessary.
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
