Glossary
Compliance Officer Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential compliance officer terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key compliance officer vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in compliance officer training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- AML
- Anti-money laundering.
- Audit
- Formal review.
- Code of conduct
- Ethics rules.
- Compliance program
- System to follow rules.
- Corrective action plan
- Plan to fix findings.
- HIPAA
- Health privacy law.
- Hotline
- Confidential reporting line.
- KYC
- Know your customer.
- Monitoring
- Ongoing checks.
- Regulation
- Rule issued by an agency.
- Regulatory exam
- Agency review.
- Remediation
- Fixing a problem.
- Risk assessment
- Finding compliance risks.
- SOX
- Sarbanes-Oxley financial law.
- Whistleblower
- Person reporting wrongdoing.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Compliance Officer practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Compliance Officer training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.