Effective Compliance Strategies: Analysis, Plan, and Automation

Question 1
Your firm is looking at cost-savings exercises across all areas. Your head of compliance suggests that the compliance department staff levels can be reduced by cutting down on the number of compliance staff involved in the various compliance investigations. You however believe that the staff are working at full capacity and any reduction in numbers will have adverse outcomes. 
a) What type of analysis will you implement and why?
b) What method(s) of analysis will you use and why?
c) After your research you record the following:
There are three full time staff dedicated to compliance investigations and that number has remained unchanged since 2018.
Each member of the team is contracted to work for 240 days throughout the year.
In 2018 there were 93 compliance investigations during the year, taking an average of 7 working days to resolve from first beginning the investigation. 
In 2019 the number of investigations rose to 108. Although the types of investigation remained similar, the duration increased to 7.5 days and there was a backlog of unstarted investigations.
In 2020 the number of investigations rose to 120 and the duration increased to 8 days, despite the nature of the investigations remaining broadly similar. The backlog of unstarted investigations increased.
Interpret these findings in a report to the senior management. Also, you are to advise them of the likely outcome if they remove one member of the investigation team. Your report must also include a section that explains how you would, if required, validate and test your hypothesis.
Question 2
Following a recent audit, concerns have been raised that the level of compliance knowledge and awareness amongst the frontline staff is uneven. You have been asked to design a compliance plan to ensure that awareness is more uniform and that the appropriate culture is embedded in the frontline staff. Before commencing the investigation, the head of compliance wants to understand your plan and how you intend to report on the current position and track any improvements as your plan progresses. 
Produce a report for the head of compliance that:
a) Outlines your recommended plan
b) Using appropriate visualisation tools, includes a dashboard that you will use to record and report on your ongoing findings.
Question 3
You work for a small, regulated firm with a small, local, client base. There is just the one office in Singapore and the firm only transacts in Singapore dollars. As part of your job, you are required to manually screen your firm’s current clients and new applicants against a selection 
of sanctions checklists each day. The business is growing, so this task is becoming too onerous and there have been times recently when you have not had the opportunity to do the screening for several days. This has meant that some new applicants have been onboarded 
before the screening has been undertaken. 
Write a report to your board to suggest the use of a commercially available automated system. The report should highlight why the new technology is needed, acknowledge costs, cover a proposed schedule, detail how the technology will solve the current problems, how it will prevent future problems and how you propose to measure the success of the implementation if it goes ahead. The report should also acknowledge that such automated systems are prone to substantial exception reporting, especially at outset, and include a proposal to deal with the exceptions.