SCCE-HCCA Chief Abruptly Out
The Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association abruptly parted ways with their joint CEO Gerry Zack on Monday, seven years after he arrived and just weeks after a successful SCCE annual conference.
Zack
SCCE and HCCA, which operate as one organization under supervision of a joint board, announced Zack’s departure Monday evening in a sparse three-paragraph statement that did not specify why he left. The statement only said Zack “has left the association as CEO” and “we would like to thank him for his years of dedicated service and contributions to our mission and members.”
Dan Roach, a long-time chief compliance officer in the healthcare industry and a former SCCE-HCCA board member, has been named interim CEO. The organization hasn’t said yet how it plans to choose a permanent successor to Zack. Zack first arrived at SCCE-HCCA in 2017 as incoming CEO, and had a two-year transition period with his predecessor Roy Snell.
Neither Zack nor Roach returned requests for comment on Zack’s departure; nor did a few SCCE-HCCA board members I contacted as well. As always, people in the know can reach me at [email protected] if they’d like to have a confidential conversation.
We can say that SCCE-HCCA has had financial ups and downs in the last two years. Revenues have been rising, but expenses rose even faster (particularly program expenses, which jumped 38 percent from 2021 to 2023), so the organization has been operating at a deficit lately. See below, taken from the SCCE-HCCA annual reports.
To be fair, the above financial picture is more complicated than it looks. For example, the decline in net assets in 2022 includes steep investment losses, separate from operating losses; par for the course that year as the stock market went wobbly. Likewise, program expenses jumped in 2022 and 2023 because (like many organizations) SCCE-HCCA had to offer in-person, online, and hybrid events all at once, which pushed up programming costs considerably.
Membership in SCCE and HCCA has drifted downward in the last several years, from “more than 20,000” cited in the 2019 annual report, to 19,000 in 2022, to 18,700 cited in the 2023 annual report. (Roughly two-thirds of that number are HCCA members, the rest SCCE members.)
Zack earned $619,000 in compensation in 2022, according to the organization’s most recently available tax returns. That’s up from $501,000 in 2019, the year Zack took over as permanent, full-time CEO.
SCCE-HCCA itself has roughly 100 employees.
[Editor’s note: We subsequently had a podcast interview with Zack to discuss his tenure at SCCE-HCCA and the future of the compliance profession generally, if people want to hear a more at-length conversation.]