Compliance Management

Compliance management is the ongoing work of identifying which laws and standards apply to an organisation, assigning someone to own each one, putting controls in place, and checking that those controls actually work. It is a management discipline rather than a piece of software, and it sits with the board and the executive as much as it sits with HR.

Accountability is where it bites. ASIC lists governance and directors’ duties failures among its enduring enforcement priorities, carried through its 2024, 2025 and 2026 priority statements. Under section 180(1) of the Corporations Act, a director must exercise care and diligence, measured against what a reasonable director in the same position, with the information available at the time, would have done. Appointing a compliance manager does not end a director’s own obligation to stay across the risks the business is carrying.

In practice, managing compliance in an Australian organisation means keeping track of:

• which obligations apply to the business, and who owns each one by name rather than by department
• Conflicts of interest and the declarations that keep a decision defensible after the fact
• Competition and consumer law duties in how the organisation prices, sells and advertises
• the evidence trail, so a question from a regulator, an auditor or a board member is answered from records rather than from memory

The obligations themselves move. ASIC’s 2026 priorities added misleading pricing practices and financial reporting misconduct to its published focus areas, which is a fair reminder that a risk register written once and left alone goes stale. The current list sits on the ASIC enforcement priorities page. Duties differ across states and territories and between industries, and they change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice.

Posts tagged here cover how Australian organisations structure the function, where it stalls, and how to make it earn its place. To see what supports it, look at Sentrient’s compliance management system, the workplace compliance solution built around it, and the compliance training courses that carry obligations down to staff.