Disentangling the Expectation Gap for Compliance Officers

Abstract

Despite the current emphasis on compliance, the status of compliance personnel is still relatively unexamined by scholars. The invisibility of compliance personnel attributable to a lack of relative power within the firm as well as the conflicting notions that exist as far as their duties, responsibilities, functions, as well as their title and qualifications, raises the crucial question whether the compliance profession is facing an expectation gap. In the first part of the chapter, the compliance program and the impact of non-compliance are contextualized within the ethical culture and internal coherence. In the second part of the chapter, the authors utilizing Porter’s (1988, 1993) theoretical model of the expectation gap, developed in reference to the accounting profession, report findings from an empirical survey of the compliance officers in Cyprus.