Always Audit Ready

Even as an introverted computer nerd, I still sometimes feel the need to have friends or family over to hang out. On those occasions, I have fallen into a pretty predictable pattern at home. I will let my wife know well in advance that people are coming over and then she will go through an ever-growing list of things that need to be cleaned or fixed before this can happen. We will then commence the home makeover project over the days and weeks to come, cleaning, dusting, and even hiring cleaners to get the house in impeccable condition.

When the guests arrive, we show them around, have dinner, hang out, and then slowly let the house devolve back to the state it was in before we made plans to have people over. I expect this pattern to pretty consistently repeat for the rest of my life.

I got to thinking, this is not the only time I see this pattern. At work, I feel like audits have pretty much been exactly the same way. You get notice of an upcoming audit or inspection so you start doing your self-assessments, figuring out where the problems are, and go through a mad rush to clean up everything before the auditors arrive.

Because of this mad rush, audits are always stressful, high-risk, and pretty much completely unenjoyable. They derail your plans and become the sole focus for a while until you can pass successfully. In the worst case, you get an unannounced audit where they show up and you have no time to prep. Then, they see all of your out-of-date paperwork and the general mess that things have become.

Over my career, I have been a Federal employee who commissioned audits of contractors, I have been a federal contractor on the receiving end of one of those audits (significantly less fun!), and then as a consultant who helps organizations recover from bad audits during my time at C2 Labs. No matter where I have been, Fed or Contractor, public or private sector, the problems are the same.

Compliance is based on paperwork that is static while the real world refuses to slow down long enough to ever let the paper catch up. The result is a cadence mismatch that makes audits high risk and that often results in embarrassing findings or fines. The question we started to ask ourselves is: how do we make compliance real-time so you can always be audit-ready?

The result of that question is our RegScale platform. We wanted to re-imagine compliance where it could be real-time, continuous, and complete. To do this, we moved beyond yesterday’s form-based data entry tools into a system that is Application Programming Interface (API) driven allowing real-time machine to machine communications. The result is our customers have self-updating paperwork, auto-assigning tickets for issue remediation, and increased visibility into their audit risk posture.

Customers are connecting RegScale with continuous monitoring tools, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, drones, data repositories, and other solutions to have an integrated picture for the first time. The result is evergreen paperwork that takes less labor to create, issues become visible immediately to reduce surprises, and everyone has visibility into the compliance posture at all times allowing our customers to become always audit-ready.

As the world becomes more interconnected, now is the time to adopt a continuous compliance platform to help you become always audit-ready. Customers everywhere are changing their expectations for audit readiness from the Department of Defense pushing Continuous Authorization to Operate to the Department of Energy pushing always audit-ready Contractor Assurance, customers are demanding real-time compliance and RegScale is purpose-built to meet this need.

Contact us today to schedule a demo and see our Continuous Compliance Automation platform in action. With 19 tightly integrated modules, we have built a modern and open ERP for compliance that is helping our customers remove compliance roadblocks within their organization so they are always audit-ready.