What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on SIM-04 Duty of the users to report security incidents to a central body?

Internal communication naming the central reporting point and the reporting duty; Partner agreement clause imposing the same reporting obligation externally; Acknowledgement records confirming staff received the reporting instruction; Awareness material stating that unfounded reports are not penalised.

What is the most common gap auditors find on SIM-04?

Reporting duty covers employees only and omits contractors and business partners

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Security Incident Management

`SIM-04` Duty of the users to report security incidents to a central body

Inform employees and external business partners of their agreed or contractually imposed duty to report promptly, to one previously designated central office, any security event they learn of that relates to the cloud service, and confirm that mistaken reports carry no penalty.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), SIM-04. 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

HR system / LMS

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

Acknowledgement records confirming staff received the reporting instruction · HR system / LMS

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Internal communication naming the central reporting point and the reporting duty · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Partner agreement clause imposing the same reporting obligation externally · Vendor register / contract repository
Awareness material stating that unfounded reports are not penalised · 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

Reporting duty covers employees only and omits contractors and business partners
Several parallel reporting channels exist with no single designated office
The no penalty message is never communicated, which suppresses early reporting
Instruction given once at hire and never repeated or refreshed

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

SIM-03 Documentation and reporting of security incidents · SIM-05 Evaluation and learning process