Compliance Week fans, it is that time of year again! Today we open registration for the Compliance Week 2015 conference, which will happen May 18-20 in Washington, D.C.—and as usual, we are calling for speakers, advisers, and all other hangers-on who want to help with one of the compliance community’s premiere events.

First, a thank you. The Compliance Week 2015 conference will be our 10th anniversary event. Few things in business survive even five years, let alone 10, and we are here because of the support you all have shown Compliance Week over the years. We’ve always been honored and humbled by that enthusiasm, and we intend to return the favor by delivering another quality event, filled with quality people and discussion.

To get there, we need your help again.

We like to build our conference agenda by crowd-sourcing—so to that end, please take our online survey at www.surveymonkey.com/s/cw2015poll, to give us a sense of the compliance concerns you have in our modern business world. The survey is secure, anonymous, and only 12 questions long, so you can complete it in one sitting. We ask you to rate the importance of subjects we know should be on the Compliance Week 2015 agenda somehow:

Fraud;

Investigations;

Internal control;

Running your program;

Ethics & codes of conduct;

Regulatory compliance;

Privacy and data security.

Your input will help us determine how much attention to give to each of those broad subjects. For example, “fraud” is far too broad a word for this audience: what types of fraud do you want to learn about, and how to prevent? Within “running your program,” do you want to know more about managing conflicts of interest, or about rolling out policies across a decentralized business?

So again, if you can take our online survey, we will be grateful for the help. We’ll share the results in a future column, and at the opening day of Compliance Week 2015 next May.

Beyond the survey, compliance enthusiasts can help in other ways. First, we need volunteers to serve on the 2015 conference advisory board. This is the group that will help us shape that survey feedback into specific panel sessions, case-studies, and other presentations, and every year the advisory board’s help is invaluable. Yes, there will be conference calls, but only two of them; the advisory board also gets recognition on our conference materials and ultra-low pricing to attend the event itself, in exchange for your service.  

Second, we need compliance executives willing to speak at our conference. Are you especially proud of one particular achievement or process at your company? Do you have great vendor risk management? Have you handled a deferred-prosecution agreement so skillfully regulators ended it early? Maybe drafted the perfect bring-your-own-device policy, or rooted out fraud in your travel-and-entertainment budget down to the penny? We want to hear those stories.

The Compliance Week conference is famed for putting real compliance executives on stage to talk about their challenges, triumphs, and even the occasional misstep—so if you’ve done anything like what we outlined above, we want to hear from you. The bad news: We restrict speaking opportunities to in-house corporate executives only (no offense meant to vendors or service providers, who do great work too). The good news: registration fees are waived for speakers. You do need to cover your own travel and lodging, but otherwise can attend the entire conference at no charge.

If any of the above appeals to you, email me at mkelly@complianceweek.com, and I’ll respond within 24 hours to get the conversation started. This conference exists to serve you, so speak up as often as you’d like. And check back in this space often, since we’ll be bringing you many more details in the next nine months!

The event will run from Monday, May 18, through noon Wednesday, May 20, in Washington, D.C., at the Mayflower Hotel as usual. We still expect to bring together 450-500 risk, audit, and compliance professionals from corporations across the globe. We still plan to host keynote speakers who will offer the latest thinking in how corporate governance and compliance should work, plus plenty of your corporate peers talking about how corporate governance and compliance really does work. Registration is now open, and our early-bird price of $1,545 per person will be in effect until Dec. 31.

See you there!