A compliant records management program is incomplete—and frequently at risk of non-compliance—if employees aren’t held accountable for following policies. Implementation of audit and accountability measures will help you ensure that compliance procedures are being followed across your entire enterprise.

Ensuring ownership

Audit and accountability can be viewed as the two bookends of records management. When designing your program, you want to build in accountability to ensure clear ownership of records management responsibilities throughout the organization. It is essential to develop comprehensive policies and procedures to facilitate employee involvement and compliance across your enterprise:

• Evaluate your current practices
• Update policies and procedures
• Assist in implementation, including communication and training activities to encourage employee participation

Measuring compliance

Many organizations struggle with the key best practice of audit and accountability. In Iron Mountain’s industry-wide compliance benchmark survey of nearly 2,000 organizations, 36% reported they did no compliance monitoring at all or had procedures in place that were not functional. Another 28% reported inconsistent monitoring. We can help you to overcome these obstacles by working with you to develop and implement robust audit capabilities that:

• Demonstrate your good faith and monitor progress toward compliance
• Build an effective audit infrastructure
• Meet regulatory obligations
• Continually strengthen accountability by measuring corporate, business unit and individual performance against key audit metrics
• Ease the burden of responding to external audits and regulatory assessments

Learn about the guiding principles supporting this best practice