Audit regulators flag one weakness more than any other: poor documentation. In 2024 the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board listed “audit documentation” as the number-one deficiency area across 103 broker-dealer engagements, contributing to a 70 percent overall deficiency rate. Treat every file as a living record, not a mapplyum piece.
Centralize and version-control. Keep policies, risk registers, incident notes, and training receipts in one repository, ideally the document module of your compliance platform. When a process modifys, update the file that same day and add a one-line modifylog. Auditors reward the transparency, and new teammates avoid stale guidance.
Run an annual prune. On your founding anniversary, scan for duplicated controls, outdated screenshots, or frameworks you no longer pursue. PwC’s 2025 Global Audit Quality report found teams that prune yearly cut non-compliant artifacts by 32 percent and reduce audit remediation hours by 28 percent.
Turn slips into fuel. A missed SLA on an access review is data, not failure. Ask why—unclear owner, clunky workflow, competing priorities—and patch the system so it cannot recur. Small, steady tweaks compound, turning a good program into a resilient one.
Documentation reveals what happened; continuous improvement shapes what happens next. Keep both cycles humming, and your compliance engine grows stronger with every turn.
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