CCO (Corporate or Chief Compliance Officer)

A Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) is a corporate official in charge of overseeing and managing compliance issues within an organization, ensuring, for example, that a company is complying with regulatory requirements and that the company and its employees are complying with internal policies and procedures. 

The job of the Chief Compliance Officer includes:  

• Policy and Procedure Management -- defining, communicating, training and attesting to corporate policies and procedures.
• Compliance Monitoring -- evaluating and measuring the state of compliance across the organization.
• Investigations -- managing investigations into wrong doing and anything that violates regulatory/legal requirements.

Corporations have become concerned about compliance because of increasingly stringent and complex legal requirements. According to the technology research firm Gartner, 41% of corporations in the United States had a designated Chief Compliance Officer in 2010.

CCO is one of a growing number of corporate titles including CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, CCO and CSO.

See also:  electronic discovery, compliance audit, PCI compliance, Report on Compliance (ROC), compliance validation, Compliance: Glossary