Quarterly Compliance Committee Reporting in Pharma: Smarter Data Collection and Reporting in a Global Corporation

In a large international pharmaceutical company, collecting data for the Compliance Committee (CC) is rarely straightforward. You have dozens, perhaps hundreds of business units, regional offices, country affiliates, and functional (HQ) teams. Each must feed in quantitative and qualitative metrics, key risk indicators, remediation updates, audit results, training compliance, investigations, and more. And this must be done under strict deadlines, at least four times per year, so that the CC can meaningfully oversee program performance, trends, and red flags.

In practice, that means chasing local offices, dealing with missing or inconsistent information, merging spreadsheets, clarifying ambiguous responses, and harmonizing diverse formats. It is painful, error-prone, and resource intensive.

This article looks at why quarterly reporting is required under compliance frameworks, the challenges of gathering information across a multinational network, and how Ethical by Upryt (via Risk Assessments, Program Management, and Matters Management) can help make the process smoother, more consistent, and less stressful 🙂.

Why quarterly reporting to the Compliance Committee matters 

In many large pharma or life sciences companies, the Ethics & Compliance (E&C) function uses the OIG’s framework of “Seven Elements of a Successful Compliance Program” as a reference benchmark for best practice. 

According to the 2023 OIG guidelines, the Compliance Committee should meet no less than quarterly. These meetings serve as the CC’s main oversight forum: reviewing risks, identifying gaps, checking corrective actions, and monitoring KPIs.

Here’s how the seven elements connect to CC reporting and how they tie to oversight:

• Written policies & procedures: Report on policy implementation, revision status, and deviations.
• Compliance leadership & oversight: CC reviews quarterly reports as part of its governance role.
• Training & education: Track and report training completion rates and outcomes.
• Communication / disclosure mechanisms: Summarize hotline data, cases, trends, and remediation.
• Enforcement / discipline: Provide statistics on violations, sanctions, and patterns.
• Monitoring / auditing / risk assessment: Share audit findings, risk scores, follow-up actions.
• Responding & corrective action: Detail remediation efforts and steps to prevent recurrence.

Because the CC’s role is to oversee and guide the compliance program, it needs visibility into all these elements, hence the quarterly cycle ✅.

Challenges in Collecting Compliance Data Globally

Multinational pharmaceutical organizations often encounter significant obstacles during quarterly compliance committee reporting cycles:

Fragmented Data Sources

While headquarters may utilize sophisticated dashboards, many regional or local offices rely on a mix of local spreadsheets or even manual logs. Submissions arrive in varying formats: Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoint slides, and the level of internal audit or compliance expertise also varies, leading to uneven detail and input quality.

Inconsistent Formats and Definitions

Definitions for key metrics can differ by region. For example, one location might include preliminary inquiries in the count of “open investigations,” while another does not, reporting periods may be based on either calendar or fiscal quarters, and the integration of local regulatory metrics is inconsistent across different offices.

Late or Incomplete Submissions

Certain units may miss reporting deadlines and submit data after the fact. The central E&C team spends substantial time sending reminders, following-up, and making corrections. Some regional teams submit incomplete information or seek clarification, which leads to delays in consolidating reports.

Manual Consolidation and Validation

The central team receives numerous versions of reports through emails and spreadsheets, making manual reconciliation and normalization essential. Cross-verification may be needed with departments such as internal audit, legal, and HR, further complicating the process.

As organizations grow, so do these pain points, leading to long hours, higher error risk, and last-minute stress before CC meetings.

How Ethical by Upryt can simplify and de-risk the process

Upryt’s Ethical platform offers three modules especially relevant: Risk Assessments, Program Management, and Matters Management. Let’s examine how each can help you streamline and strengthen quarterly CC reporting.

Risk Assessments

Risk Assessments allow you to create structured evaluations of risk exposure across all affiliates. You can design templates that use consistent scoring criteria: likelihood, impact, business factors, so local offices assess risks using the same definitions. Results roll up into regional and global views, giving you a “bird’s-eye” perspective of the organization’s risk landscape.

For CC reporting, Risk Assessments provide:

• Consistent data points: Affiliates use the same template, ensuring comparability.
• Trending and early warning: Repeated assessments highlight risks that are intensifying or subsiding.
• Stronger linkage to CC discussions: The CC sees not only metrics but also a forward-looking view of top risks and how mitigation is progressing.
• Traceability: Each risk assessment is timestamped and versioned, providing an audit trail for data provenance.

By embedding risk assessments into the quarterly cycle, you equip the CC with a structured and comparable view of risks across affiliates, enabling more informed discussions and proactive decision-making.

Program Management

Program Management turns your compliance plan into concrete, trackable tasks and assessments. For CC reporting, you can:

• Deploy standardized surveys or forms to affiliates each quarter to capture metrics like training completion, policy exceptions, investigations, or audit results.
• Assign ownership and deadlines, with automated reminders to those responsible.
• Track progress in real time: See which affiliates have responded, who is overdue, and where data gaps remain.
• Aggregate responses automatically: Data arrives in a consistent format, reducing the need for manual consolidation.
• Drill down by region or unit: Spot anomalies, red flags based on your KPIs, missing values, or late submissions quickly.

This approach replaces countless email reminders and spreadsheet merges with a structured, transparent process that saves time and reduces errors.

Matters Management

Matters Management standardizes the way issues are logged and tracked across the organization. Each matter template follows a defined workflow with statuses, owners, deadlines, and documented remediation steps.

For CC reporting, Matters Management provides:

• A consolidated view of open and closed matters, broken down by type, region, or business unit.
• Consistency in reporting: Every matter is captured with the same required fields, avoiding local variations.
• Remediation tracking: The CC can see whether corrective actions are completed on time and where delays persist.
• Auditability: Each change to a matter is recorded, so data can be traced back to its source.
• Together, these features ensure that the CC receives not only a list of matters but also insight into trends, remediation status, and organizational accountability.

Suggested workflow for quarterly CC reporting using Ethical by Upryt

Below is a high-level workflow that any E&C team could adopt using Ethical by Upryt:

1. Run your Risk Assessment cycles to assess your Risks and report on them

2. Design the CC data template or survey in Program Management

• Based on your CC dashboard / metrics needs, define standardized questions and data points (KPI values, narrative commentary, matter counts, audit results, etc.).
• Allocate scores and color-codes to some answers, to spot areas of improvement and risks easily.

3. Launch the recurring assessment 

• schedule your quarterly “CC data submission” assessment, linked to the assessment (e.g. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4).
• Assign it to your Business Units: compliance leads or affiliate E&C contacts with clear deadlines and reminders.

4. Deploy Matters Management templates for matters capture / update

Ensure all relevant local contacts have access to the Matter templates that are relevant to you:

• Deviation logs
• Monitoring 
• Exception requests
• Speak-up Program Monitoring
• Conference exhibit/booth monitoring
• Fair Market value (FMV) exceptions
• Medical Science Liaisons (MSL) monitoring

Instruct them to use it to log any new matters or update existing ones within the quarter.

5. Monitor progress in real time

• Use Ethical’s dashboards to track which offices have responded, which are overdue, and where data is missing or unusual.
• Automated reminders are taken care of by the platform,  send extra reminders or escalation via the system rather than by separate email chains.

6. Validate, flag anomalies, ask clarifications

Drill down to specific units via Ethical dashboards, spot outliers, red  or missing values, and issue follow-up questions through the system rather than email attachments.

7. Extract consolidated results

• Use the built-in aggregation and data export functionality to build your CC package (tables, charts, narrative summaries).
• Pull matter statistics (open / closed / in remediation) from Matters Management for inclusion.

8. Deliver to the Committee and audit-archive

• Finalize your CC report with confidence in data provenance.
• Maintain all source responses and matter histories within Ethical for audit or later reference.

9. Post-meeting review and feedback loop

• After the CC meeting, annotate in Ethical any commentary, follow-up tasks, or decisions (assign action items to the right people in the right BU).
• Incorporate those into the next quarter’s survey or matter capture as needed.

By taking this structured, platform-driven approach, you reduce manual labour, minimize errors, strengthen consistency, improve compliance maturity, and maintain an auditable, centralized repository of compliance data and matter history.

Conclusion

In a global pharmaceutical company with many affiliates, quarterly reporting to the Compliance Committee is a governance necessity. Yet the process of collecting, harmonizing, validating, and reporting compliance data is often painful, error-prone, and resource heavy.

By adopting a structured, digital platform approach, specifically using Upryt’s Ethical, you can centralize the workflows, enforce consistency, monitor progress, and simplify consolidation. That means fewer reminders, fewer manual merges, more auditable inputs, and greater confidence that your CC report is timely, accurate, and defensible.

If your E&C team is still relying on email threads and heterogeneous spreadsheets for quarterly reporting, it may be time to reimagine the process. A disciplined platform-based workflow can transform compliance reporting from a dreaded scramble into a predictable, manageable process.

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