Roles and Responsibilities in Compliance Management
Who answers for each regulatory obligation
Regulatory compliance often fails not for lack of knowledge of the rules, but because nobody is clearly assigned responsibility for keeping a specific requirement in force over time, which makes it essential to define explicit roles, from the compliance officer who coordinates the whole program, to the process owners who carry out and maintain controls day to day, through senior management, which approves the risk appetite and allocates resources. A useful model for this assignment is the RACI matrix, which clarifies for each regulatory requirement who is responsible for carrying it out, who is accountable for its compliance, who must be consulted and who must be informed. In practice, the most common mistake is for the compliance area to end up taking on by default the execution of controls that actually belong to the business areas, creating a bottleneck and a false sense of centralized compliance that doesn't reflect the organization's distributed operational reality.