5.3 Roles, responsibilities and authorities
Top management shall make sure that responsibility and authority for each role that matters to the privacy information management system are allocated and made known across the organization. It shall give specific people the responsibility and authority to keep the PIMS in line with this document and to report to top management on how well the PIMS is performing. Roles a jurisdiction may demand, such as a data protection officer, and the contact points for PII principals and customers, are dealt with by the Annex A controls (A.3.4).
Source: ISO/IEC 27701:2025, 5.3. 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 ISO/IEC 27701:2025 in the compliance library.
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
- Reports on PIMS performance reaching top management · Document repository
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Role descriptions assigning PIMS responsibilities and authorities · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Appointment of the person or function responsible for conformity and for performance reporting · Document repository
- Communication of responsibilities to those who hold them · Policy repository / GRC workspace
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- Responsibilities assigned but never communicated
- A data protection officer appointed with no authority over the processes that process PII
- Performance reporting that reaches the privacy function and stops there
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