What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on COM-02 Policy for planning and conducting audits?

Audit policy defining read only access limits and scheduling constraints; Agreed audit plan for a recent customer or third party audit; Access provisioning record showing read only rights granted to auditors; Logs of auditor activity on the system components in scope.

What is the most common gap auditors find on COM-02?

Auditors given standing administrative accounts for convenience

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Compliance

`COM-02` Policy for planning and conducting audits

Document, communicate and provide audit planning and conduct rules that confine auditors to read only access within the agreed plan, place potentially disruptive activity into maintenance windows or off peak periods, and require audit activity to be logged and monitored.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), COM-02. 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

easy

to go live

Identity provider / directory

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

Access provisioning record showing read only rights granted to auditors · Identity provider / directory
Logs of auditor activity on the system components in scope · SIEM / log platform

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Audit policy defining read only access limits and scheduling constraints · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Agreed audit plan for a recent customer or third party audit · Vendor register / contract repository

First move

Automate the pull from your Identity provider / directory. Scheduled export of users, roles and MFA state from the directory; access-review completion pulled from the IdP, not a spreadsheet.

Common gaps auditors find

Auditors given standing administrative accounts for convenience
Intrusive audit activity carried out in peak hours outside any maintenance window
Auditor sessions not logged, so their activity cannot be reconstructed
Audit scope agreed verbally with nothing written down

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

COM-01 Identification of applicable legal, regulatory, self-imposed or contractual requirements · COM-03 Internal audits of the information security management system