Compliance has been a big deal for years, ever since Sarbanes-Oxley passed into law in 2002.

For several years, the compliance officers were riding high, at least on the surface. They were said to be in heavy demand, impervious to the recession. Lots of compliance employees were hired and trained, and in the wake of Dodd-Frank, the compliance imperative has not abated.

So are compliance officers riding even higher in their saddles? Not really. Recent research from the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association found that compliance and ethics officers are one stressed out bunch.

Many operate under significant “amounts of stress, enough so that they are losing sleep and have considered leaving their jobs because of the stress.”

Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents reported that they often wake up during the middle of the night worrying about job-related stress, a comparable percentage say they have considered leaving their job in the last 12 months due to job-related stress.

In addition, almost 60 percent say that they are in an adversarial situation or isolated from colleagues in other departments.The most cited cause of stress were “keeping up with new laws and regulations, preventing compliance and ethics violations, and remediating compliance and ethics violations." Many respondents indicated “all of the above."

Tight budgets have not helped, either. Almost 30 percent say they had “nowhere near enough” budget for their compliance program.Another 44 percent felt that they had “not quite enough budget.Compliance professionals do have in-house allies in the form the legal staff

On top of all this stress, there is the added reality that compliance professionals as whole aren’t seeing massive pay increases. Growth in compensation for compliance professionals has been hard to discern over the past three years. The median pay of chief compliance officers in the financial services industry--one in which you would expect heavy demand for compliance talent--was about $125,000 per year, nearly identical to what it was in 2008.

Executives seem to be faring better. Vice-presidents of compliance earn a median salary of roughly $148,000, an increase of nearly $40,000 since 2008.If you can’t give your compliance folks a raise, maybe a smile would help. -Jim

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