U.S. Companies Projected to Spend $41.7 bn on Compliance with the EU's GDPR Legislation

SOFIA, Bulgaria, May 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

U.S. companies are projected to spend a total of $41.7 billion to achieve compliance with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The enforcement of the regulation is mere days away: May 25, 2018.

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It will bring with it heavy fines (up to 4% of global turnover or 20 mln EUR, whichever is bigger) for companies serving customers from the EU, regardless of their place of incorporation. This means that U.S. companies serving businesses and individuals from Europe need to change their internal operations to become compliant if they are to continue operating on the huge EU market.

European Union companies themselves face costs around $240 billion to prepare for the new legislation. Both projections do not include ongoing costs to maintain compliance, including technical expenditures, payroll for specially appointed Data Protection Officers (DPOs) and other personnel, and the extra legal and accounting expenses.

The data is from research by GIGAcalculator.com and is based on a set of surveys among CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and risk officers of companies regarding their GDPR compliance costs combined with extrapolation based on US and EU business census data on number and size of active businesses. In an interactive GDPR compliance cost calculator you can visualize the cost of this new regulation by comparing it to numbers of various goods and services that could have been bought at the same cost, be it in terms of number of new smartphones, or in terms of monthly food portions you can purchase for the poor or the number of cancer research projects you can fund.

"The worrying trend of crafting hugely expensive regulations with worryingly vague positive effects does not seem to be coming to a halt. For comparison, the cost of this legislation for the EU is about 4 times the nominal yearly GDP of Bulgaria, my home country (projected at $59bn for 2017), while for the majority of end-users the legislation will likely have the only effect of adding more friction in terms of consent checkboxes and paperwork," said Georgi Georgiev, Managing Director of Web Focus LLC, the company behind the research.

For further information:
Contact:
Web Focus LLC
Georgi Georgiev
+1-213-406-7637

SOURCE Web Focus LLC