In recent years compliance has emerged as one of the big IT challenges enterprises are faced with. The management of a multitude of regulations and the complexity of current business processes are problems that need to be addressed.

In this paper we present an approach based on so-called compliance templates to develop and manage compliant business processes involving different stakeholders.

We introduce the concept of a refinement process. In the refinement process each compliance template is refined in a layered way to get an executable business process. The refinement steps are executed on refinement layers by different stakeholders.

Compliance constraints are used to restrict the way a compliance template can be refined. Introduced in a certain refinement layer of the refinement process, compliance constraints are propagated to higher refinement layers.