Compliance Officers are the New Global Rock Stars

Globally, the list of big organizations that recently appointed compliance professionals was long and varied, according to Richard Cassin, writing on the FCPA Blog. “They’re rock stars now, famous and wanted,” he says. In the sports world, law professor Nicholas Wittner was hired as first chief compliance officer of Michigan State University in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar scandal, and FIFA, the corrupt, Zurich-based body that oversees world soccer, hired Edward Hanover, an American, as chief compliance officer. Big economies -Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico – are requiring compliance programs, and therefore hiring compliance officers. Regulators and enforcement agencies worldwide now expect and often require companies to have verifiable compliance cultures. A November 2018 SEC filing from Goldman Sachs about its role in the Malaysian 1MDB scandal blamed its own substandard compliance culture in Southeast Asia. A compliance training video produced by Mastercard won several top media awards in 2018.