Cannabis Dispensary Compliance Manager Job Description: 5 Key Responsibilities

You already know that as a cannabis retail owner, compliance is your number-one priority. After all, a compliance infraction can potentially result in the revocation of your commercial cannabis operator’s license — which would effectively put you out of business.

For this reason, it’s critical to have a dedicated staff member whose sole responsibility is to ensure your cannabis retail operation remains compliant at all times.

Let’s take a look at five key responsibilities of your cannabis dispensary’s compliance manager.

What Does A Dispensary Compliance Manager Do?

1. Develop and maintain policies and procedures to prevent illegal, unethical or improper conduct.
2. Conduct regular audits of the facility.
3. Investigate and resolve compliance concerns, issues or violations.
4. Keep up with regularly changing rules and regulations and ensure understanding and implementation throughout the company.
5. Collaborate with management to compile compliance concerns, issues or violations.

Develop and maintain policies and procedures to prevent illegal, unethical or improper conduct.

Just like in a traditional retail setting, you need policies, procedures and practices that deter improper conduct by employees. In cannabis retail, these include ensuring every customer’s ID gets checked to prevent selling to underage patrons and having a system in place to prevent looping — both of which are major compliance infractions.

Conduct regular audits of the facility.

While you also need a dedicated inventory manager to maintain tight control of your high-value product, the compliance manager should double-down on inventory audits as well as audits of all other store processes and procedures to help prevent compliance infractions before they happen.

Investigate and resolve compliance concerns, issues or violations.

In the event of a compliance infraction — or if upper management has a specific compliance concern — the compliance manager will be in charge of investigating the matter and ensuring it gets resolved. This may include liaising with law enforcement or state agencies in the event of intentional employee misconduct.

Keep up with regularly changing rules and regulations and ensure understanding and implementation throughout the company.

This is perhaps one of the most important responsibilities the compliance manager is charged with. Our industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, but it’s also constantly in flux with new and updated laws and regulations at the state and local levels. And, in the future, federal cannabis compliance will have to be integrated into your operation as well.

Your compliance manager must constantly monitor all applicable laws, regulations and compliance requirements. Of particular concern is state-mandated reporting requirements — several states have had multiple shifts in compliance reporting requirements or made changes to their reporting systems. No matter what changes occur, your operation must be on point and always in compliance with the rules.

Collaborate with management to compile compliance concerns, issues or violations.

Just like the other aspects of your operation, you’ll want to have regular meetings with your compliance manager to compile, review and resolve any and all compliance concerns that have come up. Weekly or bi-weekly meetings are recommended in order to keep all levels of management up to date on open, pending or resolved compliance issues.

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