Reporting Compliance to Senior Management and Committees

Reporting compliance to senior management and risk committees requires a very different level of synthesis from the technical report the compliance team uses internally, prioritizing business impact and the decisions leadership must make over exhaustive detail on each assessed control. A good executive report answers concrete questions, such as whether the organization is in a position to keep its certifications current, what new regulatory risks have appeared during the period and what additional resources are needed to close critical gaps, instead of listing the status of each regulatory requirement one by one. In practice, these reports should be presented on a regular, consistent schedule, not only when there's a problem, because a committee that only hears about compliance when something fails tends to associate it solely with bad news, instead of seeing it as a governance function that provides constant visibility into a risk relevant to the business.