New Office Helps BU Meet Regulatory Mandates
Veteran BU lawyer heads new Compliance Services
Faculty and staff at large research universities like Boston University have to manage a thicket of federal, state, and local regulations. A recent report from a bipartisan Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education noted that “colleges and universities find themselves enmeshed in a jungle of red tape, facing rules that are often confusing and difficult to comply with.” A new office of Compliance Services will now support BU faculty and staff in their efforts to understand and comply with those myriad regulations.
The University’s existing compliance programs, such as those in research compliance, athletics, and Title IX, and responsibilities relating to compliance, will remain with existing schools, colleges, and departments. The new office of Compliance Services will support those efforts, and will serve as an information clearinghouse and communications pipeline between different compliance offices to promulgate best practices. It will be led, during its start-up phase, by Crystal Talley, who has been named associate vice president for compliance services. Talley has been an associate general counsel at BU since 2004.
Individual compliance offices “do a very good job meeting those compliance obligations, but we hope to offer centralized oversight and support” as other universities are adopting, says Talley. “A centralized view will help us assess whether we’re approaching compliance as efficiently as we can. If current compliance efforts are effective and efficient, we don’t want to fix what’s not broken. But if it turns out two or three offices are addressing the same issues, we may be able to do it in a simpler way.”
Talley points out that some compliance obligations affect several different departments. For example, she says, several BU entities offer medical care, from Student Health Services to the Goldman School of Dental Medicine. “That may present an opportunity to work with those departments to determine whether they are tackling similar compliance issues and can share best practices.”
Another example cited by Talley: following the 2012 conviction of Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State assistant football coach, for sexually assaulting young boys, universities reviewed procedures for protecting minors who come to campuses. Protecting minors—from having personnel trained in such matters to checking the background of outside groups, like camps, that host minors on campus—can’t be relegated to a particular college, says Talley. BU handled the matter with a task force headed by the University’s Human Resources office; in the future, Compliance Services will help those kinds of coordination activities.
President Robert A. Brown says BU is following the same strategy as fellow members of the Association of American Universities. “With the creation of this office, Boston University joins many of our AAU peers who have established a centralized compliance function to respond to the increasing proliferation of federal and state regulations and the need for more focused oversight.”
Choosing Talley to lead the new office reflects the need for “someone who had already a deep understanding of the laws and regulations facing universities, could quickly understand the culture of Boston University, was a collaborator and facilitator, and would work well with faculty and staff,” says Erika Geetter, vice president and general counsel. “It struck me that I had the absolutely perfect person in my office already. There’s not going to be any downtime where you have to build trust and relationships; those are already there.”
Attorney Sheila O’Leary will handle Talley’s associate general counsel duties until Talley’s successor at Compliance Services takes over.
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