Are you looking for a legal compliance audit? A compliance audit, or independent review, verifies your organisation’s compliance with a regulatory requirement (such as a law, rule, code, standard or best practice) by gathering evidence. An audit is usually conducted after implementation and often results in the auditor certifying compliance or someone else certifying it. It looks backwards and is about verification and assurance.
We have years of experience conducting compliance audits across specific focus areas. We can also do an assessment or gap analysis, but those are something different.
The flavours of compliance audits or reviews we offer
We have grouped the issues under main categories:
- Data protection audit (to check you comply with one or more data protection laws, codes or standards)
- Protection of Personal Information Audit (to check whether you comply specifically with POPIA)
- Intellectual Property (to identify, protect and enable exploitation of your valuable IP)
- Electronic Process (to ensure that an automatic or electronic process is lawful and binding)
- Plain Language Document (we check your existing documents and, where necessary, convert existing documents into plain language without losing legal effect or weakening your rights)
- Social Media (will establish the current state of affairs regarding social media and your organisation)
- Website (we ascertain the extent to which the organisation’s website complies with applicable law)
- Monitoring (to check that you are monitoring communications lawfully)
- Electronic Communications and Transactions (to ensure the legality of transactions that you conclude electronically (including contracting by email and SMS), the legal issues around electronic VAT invoices and email)
- Information Sensitivity (to identify what “sensitive” information you possess, what laws apply to such information and how to restrict access to and handle it)
- Document Imaging (to check the organisation’s document imaging practices)
- Access to Information (to check compliance with access to information or freedom of information laws)
- IT Goods or Services (the acquisition, management and disposal of IT goods and services)
- Information Security (to check your compliance with information security law)
We sometimes combine the audits, and that is usually called an IT Legal Compliance Audit (we audit your compliance with IT law generally).
An audit is similar to a gap analysis
They are different but have similar components. A gap analysis compares your organisation against an identified regulatory requirement and determines how well it complies. The scope, process and deliverables are often similar. For more information about how we can help you with a regulatory compliance gap analysis, or specifically a data protection gap analysis.