The Compliance Officer in Nonprofit Cooperative Societies: Validation of the figure through the Best–Worst Method

Abstract

The objective of this research is to validate the responsibilities attributable to the figure of the Compliance Officer based on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 37301 Standard on Compliance Management Systems. The lack of previous studies and the need of the Compliance Officer as an important figure within Nonprofit Cooperative Societies justify our interest and the timeliness of this research. Besides, Nonprofit Cooperative Societies can play a significant role in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through their unique structure and community-focused mission. Based on ISO 37301, a total of 27 indicators have been defined and grouped into 6 blocks. In order to empirically validate the proposed indicators, a questionnaire was designed and anonymously answered by a series of expert managers in the mentioned sector in Spain. Afterward, a multi-criteria decision approach, the so-called Best-Worst Method, is applied to obtain the optimal weights of such indicators from the questionnaire answers. In the event of differences of opinions regarding the resulting weights, a consensus process based on minimum cost consensus is applied to obtain agreed weights that satisfy all the experts.