Compliance Dashboard

What a compliance dashboard is

A compliance dashboard (لوحة الامتثال) is a consolidated view of where an establishment stands against its regulatory obligations at a single point in time: what has been met, what is approaching its due date, and what has passed it.

A compliance dashboard is a management practice, not a legal term. In the sources we reviewed, we found no provision that requires an establishment to keep such a dashboard, none that sets what it must contain, and none that recognises it as a procedure. What follows describes what establishments do with one and what makes it useful. It does not report a legal rule.

The obligations a compliance dashboard displays come from other instruments: the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل), its Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية), ministerial decisions, and the programmes run by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development. The dashboard adds no obligation to that list and removes none. It shows the establishment its own position against them.

What makes a line on a compliance dashboard usable

A compliance dashboard is a column of lines, and it is only as reliable as its weakest line. A line is usable when it carries four things together:

• An obligation named with its source. It names a specific requirement issued by a specific instrument: not “Saudization” in general, but a particular percentage set by a particular decision, such as one of the profession Saudization decisions. An obligation with no source cannot be checked, cannot be challenged, and gives no sign of when it changed.
• A single source of truth. It states where the status is taken from: the Ministry’s record, the establishment’s own system, or a certificate. A line filled in by hand from an employee’s memory is an opinion, not an indicator.
• An owner by name. It names a person, not a department. An obligation assigned to “human resources” is assigned to nobody.
• A due date, and the date of the last check. It carries the due date and also the last time anyone checked the status. A green line that has not been updated for three months does not say that the position is sound. It says that nobody has looked.

Each of the four answers a different question. The source answers what the obligation is, the source of truth answers how its status is known, the owner answers who acts on it, and the two dates answer when it falls due and when it was last confirmed. A line that leaves one of those questions open shows a colour without showing what the colour rests on.

The kinds of obligation a compliance dashboard keeps apart

Mixing different kinds of obligation in one column is one way a compliance dashboard goes wrong. An establishment’s obligations are not all of one type, and showing them in a single colour scheme makes what is not urgent look urgent, and the reverse:

• A standing state to be maintained. It is a condition that should remain true over time, such as contracts remaining documented and documents remaining valid. It is measured as a proportion, and it is monitored by its trend rather than by events.
• A periodic action with a due date. It is a step repeated on a cycle, such as uploading a monthly file or submitting a statement on time. It is measured by whether the date was missed, and its date is its indicator.
• An action opened by a decision. It is a step that exists only once something has happened, such as removing a violation after a penalty has been imposed for it. It has no place on the dashboard until its cause occurs, and its period then runs from a date fixed in the text that created it.

The third kind carries the greatest risk for a compliance dashboard, because it can appear without warning and its period is short, so it may never pass through a monthly review cycle at all. A dashboard built on a monthly rhythm alone can miss it until its period has already run.

How the word compliance shifts around a compliance dashboard

The word moves between three settings, and carrying it from one setting into another confuses senses that are different:

• Compliance as the state of the establishment against all its obligations. It is the sense in which a compliance dashboard uses the word, and it is a general management sense.
• A specific compliance percentage inside a particular programme. In the Wage Protection System, the percentage is measured on a standard the programme sets for itself, and we found no published formula for how it is computed. It concerns the wage file, not the position of the establishment as a whole, and a high figure there says nothing about the remaining obligations.
• A “procedural guide for raising compliance” (دليل إجرائي لرفع الامتثال). It is a document that Clause 5 of Ministerial Decision No. 112377 dated 21/8/1447H, the decision that issued the Schedule of Violations and Penalties, delegates to the Ministry’s deputy for oversight and development of the work environment (وكيل الرقابة وتطوير بيئة العمل) to issue. It was not published with the decision. A reference to it as an existing source therefore points to a document that was not made available with the decision.

Keeping the three senses apart is what allows a compliance dashboard to show a programme’s percentage as one line among others, rather than as a summary of everything.

What a compliance dashboard does not do

A compliance dashboard is a record of a state, not the performance of a duty. A line marked “met” does not make anything met. Someone who sees the dashboard turn green and concludes that the duty has been discharged has put the representation in place of the act. The value of the dashboard lies in the questions it makes possible: who last looked at this line? Where was its status taken from? When did the text it rests on last change?

A clear sign of a dashboard that is not working is that it has been entirely green for months. The position of a living establishment does not stay still, and a dashboard that never moves is either not taking its status from its source, or measuring something that does not change.

The useful response is to go back to the four elements of a line. If the source of truth is a person rather than a record, the line can be reconnected to the record. A last check that is old calls for someone to be named to look again. And where the instrument behind a line has been replaced, the line can be rewritten against the instrument now in force, and the old one removed rather than left to stay green.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.