Compliance Is Getting Too Complex to Leave Unowned
One idea kept surfacing throughout CBT’s Fair Pricing & Compliance Summit: someone inside the dealership needs to own compliance.
For some stores, that may eventually mean a dedicated compliance officer. For others, it may mean a clearly designated leader who has the authority to review processes, coordinate training, track issues, and push changes across departments.
The exact title matters less than the ownership. Modern compliance touches nearly every part of the dealership, including advertising, pricing, websites, F&I, social media, vendor relationships, OEM programs, customer complaints, and employee training.
That is a lot to manage as a side responsibility.
Shannon Robertson Focused on Resolution
Shannon Robertson of the Association of Finance and Insurance Professionals described the industry’s compliance work as moving toward “compliance to resolution.”
That phrase stood out because it gets beyond the audit mindset. Finding an issue is not enough. Dealers need to show what they did next. Was the employee retrained? Was the process changed? Was the vendor contacted? Was the issue documented? Did leadership follow up?
That is the difference between a dealership that can say it has a compliance program and one that can demonstrate a working compliance process.
Training Needs to Match Turnover
Barrie (Charapp) Beaty, partner at Charapp & Weiss, emphasized the need for ongoing training, especially given dealership turnover. Annual training may check a box, but it does not help the salesperson who started three months later.
The same applies to managers. If expectations are not reinforced, old habits tend to return, especially under pressure at the end of the month.
Several speakers made the point that compliance has to be built into onboarding, recurring training, management expectations, and accountability. That is how it becomes part of dealership culture instead of another binder nobody opens.
What Dealers Can Do Now
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The first question for any store is simple: who owns compliance?
If the answer is unclear, the next step is to assign responsibility. That person should not be buried under the same incentives or pressures they are expected to review. They need enough independence and authority to raise issues before those issues become expensive.
From there, dealers can build a basic rhythm: review ads, track complaints, document vendor communications, refresh training, and report recurring issues to leadership. It does not have to be complicated to be valuable. It just has to be consistent.
Huge thanks to Force Marketing for making our cover again possible.
