Regardless of size, collection agencies, debt buyers and collection law firms are required to establish a compliance management system (CMS).

To remain competitive and prevent your organization from becoming a dinosaur, according to a whitepaper from Ontario Systems, available for download, the time is now to build your CMS. But you need not go it alone. In fact, the CFPB actually identifies the use of third parties as a viable option when it comes to compliance management:

“[The] CFPB understands that compliance will likely be managed differently by large banking organizations with complex compliance profiles and a wide range of consumer financial products and services at one end of the spectrum, than by entities that may be owned by a single individual and feature a narrow range of financial products and services, at the other end of the spectrum. Compliance may be managed on a firm – or enterprise-wide basis, and supervised entities may engage outside firms to assist with compliance management.”

Here is an excerpt from Ontario’s whitepaper, Top 5 Reasons You Are Ready to Hire a Compliance Partner:

Reason #1: You’ve Tried, Failed or Floundered

The collection industry’s evolution and the new age of CFPB oversight has led most agencies to make some attempt to write policies and procedures, appoint a staff member as their compliance manager, or talk the talk about the organization’s need to take compliance seriously. Unfortunately, relatively few have successfully completed these projects or actually launched their CMS.

Building a compliance management system is a lot like starting a weight loss program. Notwithstanding repeated confirmations by their doctors, many people spend years in denial assuring themselves they are not overweight and look just fine. Others start one diet only to abandon it for another and many simply don’t know how to begin. If you have lost sleep thinking about how to build your CMS, started and stopped on the construction of your CMS more times than you can count, or have simply wondered how you can afford to “do it right” you are not alone – but, you may be behind.

According to the CFPB, a compliance management system is how your organization:

• Establishes its compliance responsibilities
• Communicates those responsibilities to employees
• Ensures that responsibilities for meeting legal requirements and internal policies are incorporated into business processes
• Reviews operations to ensure responsibilities are carried out
• Reviews operations to ensure legal requirements are met
• Takes corrective action and updates tools, systems, policies, procedures, training curricula and materials as necessary

Keep in mind, not all compliance management system functions and responsibilities can be “outsourced.” No organization can absolve its responsibility to establish its responsibilities to comply with Federal consumer financial laws. But the act of communicating such responsibilities to employees; training employees; drafting policies and procedures; monitoring changes in consumer financial laws, technology and market trends; and managing and analyzing complaints, to name just a few duties, may be accomplished through the use of a reputable third party.

By retaining a third party to assist you in developing and launching your CMS, you can quickly identify and establish the steps you must take to build and implement your CMS, assign responsibilities to the third party along with specific deadlines and rest assured you will be successful – this time.