What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on AM-05 Commitment to Permissible Use, Safe Handling and Return of Assets?

Signed handling commitments held against individual personnel records; Issue register linking every handed out device or token to its current holder; Return receipts and offboarding sign off for departed employees and contractors; Risk assessment determining which asset types require an explicit prior commitment.

What is the most common gap auditors find on AM-05?

Devices handed to new starters before any handling commitment is signed

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Asset Management

`AM-05` Commitment to Permissible Use, Safe Handling and Return of Assets

Obtain a demonstrable commitment from internal and external personnel to the acceptable use and handling rules before they receive assets that the risk assessment identifies as security relevant, and evidence the return of those assets when the employment or engagement ends.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), AM-05. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Signed handling commitments held against individual personnel records · Document repository
Risk assessment determining which asset types require an explicit prior commitment · Policy repository / GRC workspace

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Issue register linking every handed out device or token to its current holder · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Return receipts and offboarding sign off for departed employees and contractors · HR system / LMS

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Devices handed to new starters before any handling commitment is signed
Leavers keep equipment with no recorded recovery attempt or write off decision
Issue register never reconciled against the list of departures
Commitments collected from employees only, leaving contracted personnel outside the control

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

AM-04 Decommissioning of Hardware · AM-06 Asset Classification and Labelling