The Compliance Certification Board (CCB) is governed by a Board of Directors appointed by the HCCA Board. The President and Immediate Past President of HCCA are ex-officio members of the CCB Board of Directors.

The mission of the CCB is to develop criteria for the determination of competence in the practice of health care compliance at a variety of levels and to recognize individuals meeting these criteria. In pursuit of this mission, CCB utilizes four basic committees: Exam Development, Continuing Education, Admissions, and Ethics. Committee members are appointed by the CCB Board of Directors from among individuals certified in health care compliance and leaders in the field.

In 1998, the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) set out to develop a certification program for healthcare compliance professionals. After preliminary work by the HCCA Board of Directors and Education Committee, HCCA established the Compliance Certification Board (CCB) in 1999 to complete the process of developing an examination and assume responsibility for managing the certification program.

The purpose of certification is to promote healthcare compliance through the certification of qualified compliance professionals by:

1. Recognizing formally those individuals who meet the eligibility requirements of CCB and pass the Examination.

2. Encouraging continued personal and professional growth in the practice of compliance.

3. Providing a national standard of requisite knowledge required for certification; thereby assisting employers, the public and members of the professions in the assessment of a compliance professional.

The examination is designed to test a well-defined body of knowledge representative of professional practice in the discipline. Successful completion of a certification examination verifies broad-based knowledge in the discipline being tested.

The examination leads to a certification credential in a discipline defined by a role delineation study. The study involved surveying practitioners in the field to identify tasks that professionals routinely perform and consider important. Each edition of the certification examination is constructed in accordance with examination specifications that list content categories and tasks to be covered and assign numbers of test items and cognitive complexity to content categories. Specifications are developed to represent tasks that are performed in professional practice.

The CCB examination is developed through a combined effort of qualified content experts and testing professionals. They review the test items to ensure that they are accurate in their content, relevant to practice and representative of good testing procedures.

Individuals who meet eligibility requirements and who successfully pass this examination attain the designation.