What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on Art.26 Joint controllers?

The joint controllership assessment identifying every relationship where purposes and means are jointly determined; The Article 26 arrangement for each, allocating responsibility for rights handling, transparency, security and breach response; The essence of the arrangement as published or otherwise made available to data subjects; Evidence the allocation reflects the real roles, such as which party holds the data and which faces the data subject; The operating process showing a rights request is honoured whichever joint controller receives it.

What is the most common gap auditors find on Art.26?

A controller to processor agreement used where the relationship is in substance joint controllership

GDPR · Chapter IV - Controller and Processor

`Art.26` Joint controllers

Where two or more controllers jointly determine the purposes and means of processing, determine their respective responsibilities for compliance in a transparent manner by an arrangement between them, unless those responsibilities are already determined by Union or Member State law, covering in particular the exercise of the data subject's rights and each party's duty to provide the Article 13 and 14 information. The arrangement may designate a contact point for data subjects. It must duly reflect the parties' respective roles and relationships towards data subjects, and its essence must be made available to the data subject. Irrespective of the terms of the arrangement, a data subject may exercise their rights in respect of and against each of the controllers.

Source: GDPR, Art.26. 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 GDPR in the compliance library.

Many articles apply only where their condition is met (a data protection officer under Article 37, an impact assessment under Article 35, a representative under Article 27); the condition is in each statement.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Document repository

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

The joint controllership assessment identifying every relationship where purposes and means are jointly determined · Document repository
Evidence the allocation reflects the real roles, such as which party holds the data and which faces the data subject · Identity provider / directory

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

The Article 26 arrangement for each, allocating responsibility for rights handling, transparency, security and breach response · Document repository
The essence of the arrangement as published or otherwise made available to data subjects · Document repository
The operating process showing a rights request is honoured whichever joint controller receives it · Document repository

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

A controller to processor agreement used where the relationship is in substance joint controllership
An arrangement signed but its essence never made available to data subjects, which is a separate obligation
Rights requests passed back and forth between joint controllers, when the data subject may exercise them against either
The allocation written to suit the commercial balance of power rather than the actual roles towards data subjects

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

Art.25 Data protection by design and by default · Art.27 Representatives of controllers or processors not established in the Union