ORA Challenges Faced: Regulatory Compliance

What challenges do auditors face when conducting an operational resilience audit in a "Regulatory Compliance"? 

Auditors must ensure the organisation maintains resilience and adheres to legal and industry-specific regulations.  Navigating regulatory compliance during operational resilience audits presents several challenges for auditors.

Diverse Regulatory Landscape

Organisations often operate in multiple jurisdictions, each with regulations and compliance requirements.

Auditors must navigate this diverse landscape, ensuring adherence to various legal frameworks, industry standards, and international regulations.

Complexity of Regulatory Changes

• Regulatory requirements are subject to frequent updates and changes due to evolving threats, technological advancements, or geopolitical shifts.
• Keeping up with these changes and assessing their impact on operational resilience can be challenging.

Interplay of Regulations

• Different regulations might overlap or conflict, adding complexity to compliance efforts.
• Balancing and aligning resilience strategies to meet the requirements of multiple regulations without compromising effectiveness can be intricate.

Depth of Compliance Assessment

• Ensuring compliance is about more than just meeting regulatory checkboxes.
• Auditors must assess whether the organisation's resilience strategies effectively address the spirit and intent of regulations, which requires a nuanced understanding beyond surface-level compliance.

Documentation and Reporting Burden

• Compliance often involves extensive documentation and reporting requirements.
• Auditors must ensure that the organisation maintains thorough records of resilience strategies, risk assessments, and compliance measures, which can be resource-intensive.

Third-Party Compliance

• Assessing the compliance of third-party vendors, partners, or suppliers with regulatory standards adds complexity.
• The organisation is responsible for its compliance and ensuring its external entities adhere to relevant regulations.

Strategy to Navigate These Challenges

Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation

Stay updated on regulatory changes and their implications for operational resilience. Implement a system for continuous monitoring to ensure timely adjustments to compliance strategies.

Holistic Compliance Approach

Develop an integrated approach that aligns resilience strategies with various regulatory requirements.

This approach should address current regulations and anticipate future compliance needs.

Collaboration and Expertise

Engage with legal experts, compliance officers, and industry specialists to gain insights into complex regulatory requirements and their implications on resilience strategies.

Robust Documentation Practices

Establish comprehensive documentation and reporting procedures that meet compliance requirements and serve as valuable records for auditing and improvement.

Third-Party Due Diligence

Implement stringent due diligence processes to ensure third-party compliance with relevant regulations, extending the compliance framework to external entities.

Effectively managing regulatory compliance in operational resilience audits requires a proactive and comprehensive approach beyond mere adherence to regulations, focusing on building a resilient framework that aligns with regulatory expectations while safeguarding against disruptions.

Summing Up ...

Addressing these challenges often requires a multidisciplinary approach involving collaboration across various departments, access to updated information, leveraging technological solutions for data analysis, and continuous adaptation to emerging threats.

Flexibility and agility in audit methodologies are crucial to assess and enhance an organisation's operational resilience effectively.

Find out more about Blended Learning ORA-5000 [BL-ORA-5] & ORA-300 [BL-ORA-3]