As per recent surveys, regulatory and compliance risk is one of the greatest strategic challenge facing global businesses. This is a finding by Ernst & Young in their recent survey. And this does not come as a surprise because there is an ever increasing regulatory burden on companies not just to remain compliant with the regulations, but also to have an upper edge when it comes to competition. Companies today have to ensure compliance with many regulations each having many compliance issues, reporting, guidelines, circulars etc. A well staffed compliance department is not always the solution, either. This is because, it is not just the sheer volumes of compliance issues, but the fact that sometimes the issue itself is debtable. Companies may take a wrong stance on issues that have various interpretations. And the consequenes of such mistakes can be shocking. Take for example the treatment of service tax issue on a type of transactions. If the services are determined to be out of scope by the company, ( but the regulator things that these services are in scope), there could be many transactions over many years done without recovery of service tax resulting in huge fines. Further, as companies become more and more global, compliance becomes an even greater challenge, forcing them to manage regulations across the globe. And this means staffing each location with a compliance department or having dedicated staff to understand these regulations.