What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on IDM-01 Policy for user accounts and access rights?

Approved role and rights concept with version history and management sign-off; Distribution and acknowledgement records showing the access policy reached internal and external staff; Matrix identifying incompatible duties that must not be held by one person; Register of individuals or systems entitled to approve entitlement changes.

What is the most common gap auditors find on IDM-01?

Role and rights concept never reissued after a reorganisation changed the underlying job families

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Identity and Access Management

`IDM-01` Policy for user accounts and access rights

Document, communicate and make available a role and rights concept plus an access management policy covering unique usernames, least privilege, segregation of duties, approval steps, periodic entitlement reviews, inactivity lockout and multi-factor authentication for privileged users.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), IDM-01. 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

Distribution and acknowledgement records showing the access policy reached internal and external staff · HR system / LMS

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Approved role and rights concept with version history and management sign-off · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Matrix identifying incompatible duties that must not be held by one person · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Register of individuals or systems entitled to approve entitlement changes · Policy repository / GRC workspace

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

Role and rights concept never reissued after a reorganisation changed the underlying job families
Policy silent on service and machine accounts used in automated authorisation
Split between approving and assigning entitlements described in prose but not fixed to named roles

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

HR-06 Confidentiality agreements · IDM-02 Granting and change of user accounts and access rights