Glossary
Compliance audit
A compliance audit verifies that an operation is following the rules that bind it: a standard, a contract, an internal policy or a regulatory requirement. It reviews the whole process, not one specific object.
What decides whether an audit is cheap or expensive is whether the evidence already exists. When every intervention left its record with time, location and owner, the file is assembled by querying; when it did not, it has to be reconstructed by asking people to remember.
In regulated operations — healthcare, transport, public sector, energy — the audit is not an exceptional event but part of the cycle. Designing the operation so that evidence is generated on its own is cheaper than preparing each audit when it is announced.
Its outcome should not be just a ruling either. An audit that also leaves its observations assigned, with an owner and a deadline, becomes an action plan; without that, the report gets filed and the same finding reappears in the next audit.
Where GoDoWorks handles this:GDW Inspections