Compliance review is a demanding job: not only are you asked to pore through hundreds of pages of insurance documents, but you’re also in charge of verifying the compliance of every vendor.
The work literally never ends, too: the paperwork that you have to do and review keeps on stacking up, especially if you’re doing compliance for a firm that contracts with multiple vendors on a regular basis. It’s too much work for just any one person. Which makes it a mystery why any company would leave manual compliance tracking to only one point person – a more common practice than you’d think.
100% Compliance Is a Risk In Itself
It’s definite, however, that a consistent denominator across places where this happens is that execs in those companies have unrealistic expectations about the compliance process. Some think that reviewing a COI will take no more than 15 minutes, where in reality it takes upwards of 40 minutes to guarantee full compliance per certificate. In a bid to reach their quotas, however, most compliance personnel abide by these unrealistic demands and so are only able to achieve roughly 50% compliance per vendor.
But facts are facts: quality compliance results take time. You only have as much protection as the compliance you’re able to guarantee – is 50% protection per certificate even worth it? Ensuring the compliance of each and every vendor will eat up hours of your time in a day and cutting corners or skipping steps will only make matters worse for you and your firm in the long run.
A Typical Day in the Compliance Team
- Write multiple emails and make a lot of calls to collect COIs;
- Review the cert and related files for errors in language and terminologies;
- Report compliance progress to execs;
- Leaf through endorsements to verify COI contents, dates, etc.;
- Investigate high-risk contractors/vendors for inconsistencies;
- Record info manually using spreadsheets or accounting software;
- Follow up on non-compliant vendors;
- Keep up with industry trends as a precaution.
Each step requires the complete focus of compliance officers as they analyze and record the information and communicate with third parties. Each step is critical and has no room for error. Your only recourse is to make the process as efficient as possible without compromising accuracy.
If you’re not directly involved in the compliance process, try putting yourself in their shoes: can you honestly say that you can still make the time to check for inefficiencies in the process?
Mistakes and Inefficiencies Cost Money, And Then Some
Bottom-line: you can’t protect your bottom-line if you insist on leaving your risk exposures and process gaps half-addressed, if not unaddressed. And what will you do in the unfortunate event that your compliance officer misses a crucial inclusion/exclusion on one of your COIs that costs you a legal battle you can’t afford with your small business? Are you willing to spend an average of $75,000 on a general liability claim you could have avoided entirely?
Luckily, we’ve advanced far enough to have technology that can help automate the brunt of the manual work in the compliance process.
COI Tracker Will Close Process Gaps and Improve Data Accuracy
By automating the most critical but menial processes in the chain, COI Tracker can free more time on your compliance officer’s part, so that s/he can invest it on other, more critical things.
Not only that, it guarantees that data entry and deadline intimations are done in above par efficiency, smoothing out your compliance process further.
When it comes to compliance, there’s a lot at stake. Don’t risk when you don’t have to. Try COI Tracker for free today and iron out inefficiencies in your process.