Case Closure Times are Increasing: What Compliance Leaders Need to Know

First, the case closure data 

Let’s begin with a close look at what the benchmarking report found: 

Median Case Closure Time jumped sharply at the global level, going from 21 days in 2024 to 28 days in 2025.  

Median case closure time varied considerably from one region to another. For example, the median closure time was 26 days in North America, 34 days in South America, and a whopping 51 days in both Europe and Asia-Pacific. 

Median case closure time increased for just about every category of complaint, and often was at the highest level seen in recent years. For example, median Case Closure Time for Workplace Civility reports went from 22 days to 29 days, and for Business Integrity complaints went from 21 days to 29 days.  

The numbers aren’t all troubling. For example, median closure time for reports about accounting and financial reporting fraud dropped from 51 days in 2024 to 49 days in 2025 (and down from 55 days in 2023). That’s notable because reports of accounting and financial reporting fraud are notoriously difficult to investigate.  
 
Still, good news in this year’s case closure times is hard to find. Almost across the board, for companies of every size and industry, on just about every internal report a compliance officer might receive – investigating that report and closing it out is taking more time than prior years.  

Why Case Closure Time matters so much 

Among the many performance metrics compliance officers can use to assess the effectiveness of your compliance program, case closure time is one of the most important. For example: 

Faster case closure times help to build employee trust in the company’s compliance program overall. The faster you can resolve an internal report (and, as much as permissible, relay those findings back to the reporter), the more employees will “feel heard” as they speak up, and feeling heard is the most important ingredient for a speak-up culture. 

Visibility into case closure times helps you understand how to allocate your investigation resources. If you see case closure times start to extend upward, that could mean you don’t have the right tools or expertise. It might also mean that the mix of complaints you’re receiving is changing, and you need to re-allocate those resources. Regardless, you need to know what those case closure times are to start making judgments about how your compliance program should adapt. 

Case closure times help regulators, auditors, and other outsiders understand your investigation capabilities. If your company tends to close Workplace Civility complaints in, say, three days – far below the 29-day median of everyone else – expect regulators and auditors to view that skeptically. That doesn’t mean you should aim to match median closure times; lower is still better. It simply means that if you have radically different case closure times than others, outsiders reviewing your program will want to know why.  

Simply put, the more precisely you can track and study your case closure times, the better you can identify process bottlenecks, understand resource allocation issues, and convince others that, yes, the company’s internal reporting program can be trusted.  

So why are median times rising? 

At the global level, we can only speculate on a few possible reasons. Every compliance officer will still need to compare those global numbers to your own performance to draw conclusions that fit your own circumstances.  

Still, even those possible reasons are important to consider.  

Most likely is that your compliance program resources aren’t keeping up with your organization’s actual needs. Maybe that’s because you’ve had budget or staffing cuts; or maybe employees are speaking up in greater numbers and your resources aren’t keeping pace with that increased volume. Either way, it might be a simple question of whether your program’s resources match your needs or not.  

Another intriguing possibility is that introducing artificial intelligence to compliance processes might be slowing you down. That is, at least for now, AI can accelerate some intake or analysis work, but humans still need to review that work to assure that it’s accurate. That could be introducing new procedural steps that are, consequently, extending case closure times.  

A third possibility is that more companies might be seeing new types of complaints that don’t neatly fit into their existing investigation processes – as evidenced by the increase in “Other” Risk Type reports in 2025. So, those issues likely need to be investigated manually, making up new protocols along the way; and that takes more time.  

All of this raises an important question: How can compliance officers use AI and automation to address these bottlenecks?   

For example, you might be getting new types of complaints that don’t fit within your existing investigation processes. Could AI or some other process automation help to clear that bottleneck?  

Along similar lines, if your staffing levels aren’t going up, then what new, possibly AI-centric processes could you devise so the team you do have can close cases more quickly? For example, could generative AI help investigators understand issues without the need for hired, specialty expertise?  

There’s still the possibility that AI might be a bottleneck of its own, too; introducing new steps for review. Compliance officers will need to think carefully about how to define the right processes, that make the best use of your data, human talent, and technology tools (AI or otherwise) to close your cases in ways that are both efficient and trustworthy. That journey might not be easy. 

Conclusion 

Rising case closure times are problematic. Compliance teams need to figure out how to keep nudging those numbers downward without sacrificing the quality of the investigation, since that will undermine trust in the whole system.  

It all starts with a clear-eyed understanding of the data. And right now, the data in the benchmarking report needs close attention.