While most companies have established some sort of compliance program, measuring its effectiveness can be challenging. Collecting data is clearly an important part of that process, but questions remain as to what data to collect, how to collect it and how to analyze it. “When companies think about data, they automatically assume it is something very sophisticated, but it isn’t – it’s just asking how many, how much and why?” Hui Chen, former compliance counsel to the DOJ’s Fraud Section, told the Anti-Corruption Report. In this first article in a multi-part series, we discuss why companies should be measuring their compliance programs and the steps they should take to get started. The following articles will suggest some specific areas of compliance a company could consider tracking and measuring, and discuss the challenges of qualitatively measuring compliance, and gathering and analyzing data. See “Developing Key Performance Indicators and Tracking Metrics for an Anti-Corruption Program (Part One of Two)” (Feb. 24, 2016); Part Two (Mar. 9, 2016).