Regulatory compliance of business processes

Organizations, be it public or private, have to ensure that their operations are complying with various governmental regulations, otherwise they may suffer from law suits and financial losses, or they may even not be allowed to operate (e.g., in case of repeated violations). Therefore, organizations need to have a clear understanding of all the relevant regulations and verify that their business processes are designed and performed in a desired way. However, regulations can be fairly complex in terms of the conditions, targets, and scopes they refer to. Moreover, when considering a set of regulations, the possibility of interrelationships between them brings added complexity to compliance checking. Thus, ensuring regulatory compliance is not only labor and time consuming but also complex. In this paper, we propose a consistency and compliance checker framework (CCCF) that considers sets of interrelated regulations and aims at providing automated supports for organizations to analyze and verify their regulatory compliance. More specifically, CCCF takes legal regulations and business processes as inputs and provides the results of whether the regulations are consistent, whether the business processes are compliant with the regulations, and which business operations need to be adjusted in case of non-compliance. To validate our approach, we use a case study of customs declaration in international trade.