Are you dissatisfied with your credit union's complianceprocedures? You can take solace in the fact that you are notalone.

According to a new Osterman Research Report sponsored byKnowBe4, a security awareness training company based in Clearwater, Fla.,a mere 13% of companies surveyed across numerous industries arehappy with their current compliance procedures.

Despite the fact that 63% of companies surveyed consideredregulatory compliance to be “very important,” research foundtypically 19% of compliance and audit time each year is spent ontracking requirements and another 31% on gathering and maintainingaudit evidence.

“Much of the discontent stems from the focus on manualprocesses,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4. “This is quitecumbersome and expensive.”

According to the report, compliance management is subject to ahigh volume of change in regulations, with the U.S. governmentleading the way as demonstrated by the growth of the U.S. FederalRegister. This document, a daily publication that contains proposedand final regulations of U.S. federal agencies, published anaverage of 3,827 final rules and 2,445 proposed rules each yearbetween 2002 and 2012. That represents an average of 14.7 finalrules and 9.4 proposed rules each workday.

To understand the high cost of conventional compliancemanagement processes, Osterman Research conducted a survey withorganizations in numerous industries. Using a subset of theirsurvey sample to eliminate outliers, they discovered that thecombination of labor and expenditures on tools and services totals$523.93 per employee per year, or $43.66 per month. For a companywith 500 employees, that is $261,000 per year.

One of the fundamental problems of compliance management is thefact that much of it is focused on manual processes – maintenanceof spreadsheets or Word documents or home-grown software that helpan organization to stay current with its compliance obligations,but that require significant effort to maintain, KnowBe4 said.

Add to this the significant amount of time that is requiredsimply to search for the rightinformation to populate these documents and tools. One sourcehas estimated that up to 80% of the time spent by compliance riskprofessionals is focused on the search for relevant data, KnowBe4said.

Moreover, there can be significant duplicate effort on the partof compliance management staff, particularly in large anddistributed organizations because several people may be working onthe same compliance issues unbeknownst to others in theorganization, Sjouwerman said.

In conjunction with the manual nature of the compliance processin most organizations, this duplicate effort results in compliancemanagement that is relatively inefficient and may actually becontradictory in some cases as different groups develop their owninterpretation of how best to satisfy compliance issues, hesaid.

“Improving the tracking and gathering of audit evidence alonecan help an organization save considerably in both time andbudget,” Sjouwerman said.