Joe Murphy (jemurphy5730@gmail.com) is a Senior Advisor at Compliance Strategists, SCCE’s Director of Public Policy, and Editor-in-Chief of CEP Magazine.

My first impressions of Roy were when working on some of Health Care Compliance Association’s “firsts”—the first academies, the Compliance Manual, the certification program, and the ethics code. It took a little time to figure this dude out.

But I got it. He was someone who believed in the people who do compliance and ethics. I threw my lot in with SCCE when many of my closest colleagues—people I respected enormously—thought it would never match the then-dominant group in this space. But I had faith in the entrepreneurial spirit of SCCE. This is not to say it was a one-person show—far from it. But Roy was exactly the person who could both rein in people from going too far off, yet give people free rein to move forward. There were not going to be endless committee meetings, and we were not going in a direction that strayed from our mission.