Incident Management Documentation Checklist

Our job as compliance officers is not to expect perfection, but rather to be “generally effective” in preventing non-compliance. Ultimately, incident management is what compliance programs are all about. Effectiveness will be determined by how well your program discovers, investigates, corrects and documents the numerous incidents your compliance program will face.

So, when our compliance programs, education, audits and hotlines discover an incident of non-compliance, the incident needs to be managed from start to finish using the four stages of:

• Discovery
• Investigation
• Corrective Action
• Documentation

Every step must be well documented in some format that is easy to retrieve many years after the fact.

Checklist: How Would You Rate Your Documentation?

• Does your program rely on the memories of employees to recall the facts of an investigation from a few years ago?
• Are those employees still employed by the organization?
• Does your program rely on paper records and files, the oldest of which are stored off-site to make room in the office for the more recent investigations?
• Are those records easily retrieved when needed?
• Is the trail of evidence clear in showing how the incident was promptly discovered, recorded, investigated, corrected and verified as still corrected many years later?
• Are spreadsheets, emails and electronic files stored on multiple employees’ computers?
• How will you know you’ve gathered all the appropriate documentation?

If you checked one or more of the above questions, you might want to seriously consider upgrading your documentation process to something a little more efficient and reliable.

To learn how to simplify your incident management process and improve your documentation, download our free eBrief, "Simplify Your Incident Management."

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