Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer (CECO)

The chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO) is the champion of ethics and legal compliance for an organization. These individuals accomplish their duties by overseeing an organization’s ethics and compliance initiative, code of ethics and/or conduct, ethics and compliance training program, and reporting system. To be effective, a CECO must have strong working knowledge of the organization and its policies and procedures, the respective industry, relevant laws and regulations, and current ethics and compliance research and trends and be a person of integrity.

The CECO role is relatively new to business, emerging throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the position is now seen by some as a requirement for good corporate governance. The position and title of a CECO varies across organizations and industries. Some organizations ...