One of my chief responsibilities at CNCDA is to manage the development of our dealership member compliance resources. These resources include manuals, seminars, webinars, and our online resources on CNCDA Comply.

To guide the development of these resources, I meet with CNCDA President Brian Maas to discuss these resources’ roll-out in the new year at the end of each year. Should we focus on employment or advertising law? What new features should we add to CNCDA Comply? These are the questions that we seek to answer.

2020 largely began according to the script we developed at the end of 2019. We started the year with compliance seminars on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and we were laying the foundation for another compliance seminar series in the fall. However, everything changed as the shutdown orders were imposed in March 2020 and COVID-19 compliance became all-encompassing.

From the moment the first shutdown orders were issued, everyone at CNCDA worked tirelessly to provide you with the resources you needed to continue to operate in a compliant and safe manner. We held a half dozen COVID webinars, we issued daily coronavirus updates for months, and we issued many sample documents on CNCDA Comply. I am proud of the resources we were able to provide to you on COVID-19 compliance in 2020. However, our focus on this topic necessarily meant that we did not focus on other important issues.

As 2020 inched toward a close, Brian and I began planning for 2021. Of course, COVID-19 compliance would still be a major issue (at least for the first few months of 2021), but we recognized that dealers still demanded resources on issues such as F&I and advertising law. With this in mind, we worked with Rebecca Matulich, CNCDA’s fantastic Events Manager, to enlist the Manning Leaver law firm to develop a comprehensive four-part webinar series on F&I compliance.

Our goal with the F&I compliance series is twofold. First, like any CNCDA webinar, the F&I compliance series is designed to educate attendees. However, unlike our prior webinars, the F&I series is designed for existing on CNCDA Comply for many months (and even years) to provide members with the tools to educate new hires on compliance issues that are critical to dealership operations, but change much more slowly than other compliance topics, such as our COVID-19 webinars.

I will let you in on a secret — one of the long-term goals of CNCDA Comply is to develop a curriculum to educate dealership employees on key compliance topics on-demand. These courses will exist alongside all the other compliance resources on CNCDA Comply. And they will be available to you as part of your CNCDA membership.

Expect the F&I series to be available on CNCDA Comply shortly after the final part of our F&I webinar series in April. You can also expect an additional compliance course to be added to CNCDA Comply — brick by brick — in the coming months and years.

If there is a topic that you think we should cover, or if you have any thoughts or suggestions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at abento@cncda.org.