The challenge with audit evidence is rarely finding it. Most organizations already have the necessary records stored across finance, HR, and identity systems. The real challenge is bringing that information together in a way that is efficient, consistent, and audit-ready. Automated evidence collection addresses this gap by reducing manual effort and providing auditors with timely, reliable documentation.
Your Control Owners Aren’t Failing Audit. They’re Spending Too Much Time Collecting Evidence.
Every quarter, it starts the same way.
An audit kicks off. Prepared By Client (PBC) requests go out. And suddenly, people whose actual jobs have nothing to do with audits find themselves spending days chasing screenshots, downloading reports, searching old emails, and answering follow-up questions.
By the end of the quarter, everyone is exhausted.
The audit team is waiting on evidence.
Control owners are frustrated because they’re spending more time supporting audits than running the processes they’re responsible for.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, the same question keeps coming up:
Why are we still collecting evidence this way?
It’s a fair question.
Because in most cases, the evidence already exists.
The real challenge isn’t finding it. It’s figuring out how to retrieve it directly from the systems where it already lives.
The Problem Isn’t the Audit
When organizations talk about audit inefficiencies, the focus is often on testing, documentation, or managing PBC requests.
But those are symptoms, not the root cause.
The real issue is that many organizations still rely on manual processes to collect information that already exists across their technology environment. For organizations subject to SOX compliance requirements, manual evidence collection remains one of the most time-consuming aspects of control testing and audit support.
For controls such as user access reviews, change management, and user provisioning, the required evidence is typically available in:
- ERP systems
- Identity and access management (IAM) platforms
- HR applications
- Service management tools
- Security solutions
- Workflow platforms
Yet every quarter, control owners are asked to locate, compile, and submit the same information manually.
The process is repeated quarter after quarter, consuming valuable time and resources that could be focused on higher-priority business activities.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Talks About
Most organizations can estimate how many hours Internal Audit spends on testing.
Far fewer can estimate how much time the business spends supporting that testing.
That’s where the real cost often hides.
Control owners aren’t just attaching evidence to emails.
They’re:
- Searching for the latest version of reports
- Verifying information before sending it
- Taking screenshots to prove an activity occurred
- Responding to clarification requests
- Resubmitting documentation when requirements change
- Tracking down missing information across multiple systems
None of those activities directly improve the control itself.
They’re administrative tasks created by the way evidence is collected.
And they add up quickly.
According to the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors, organizations adopting data analytics report benefits such as greater assurance, broader audit coverage, and enhanced efficiency, highlighting the growing shift toward technology-enabled audit processes.
In other words, many organizations aren’t just looking to save time. They’re looking for a fundamentally better way to support assurance activities.
How Evidence Collection Became an Operational Burden
Most organizations do not set out to create an inefficient audit evidence collection process. Instead, it develops gradually over time. A control is established, an auditor requests supporting documentation, a report is downloaded, and a screenshot is saved. Because the approach works, it becomes the standard process and is repeated audit after audit.
As technology environments grow more complex, the evidence required for a single control often becomes spread across multiple systems and teams. What should be a straightforward validation exercise can quickly turn into a time-consuming effort to locate, reconcile, and organize information.
The result is frustration on both sides. Control owners spend valuable time responding to recurring requests, while auditors dedicate significant effort to tracking down evidence. In many cases, the issue is not the people involved. It’s a process that has not evolved with the business.
The Better Question to Ask
When organizations discuss automation, the conversation often begins with whether a control can be automated. In reality, the more valuable question is whether evidence collection should require manual effort in the first place.
If systems already record who approved access, who made a configuration change, when a workflow executed, or whether a control was performed, there is little reason for employees to spend time gathering and proving the same information every quarter. As organizations rethink this process, the focus shifts from requesting evidence from individuals to retrieving it directly from source systems. The result is a more efficient, consistent, and scalable approach to audit support.
Where Automation Efforts Often Stall
The biggest obstacle to automation is rarely the technology itself. More often, it is the challenge of translating business requirements into technical specifications.
Business teams understand the control objective, while IT teams understand how to build the automation. Bridging those perspectives requires clarity around the underlying requirements, including the source systems involved, the data elements needed, the business rules that must be applied, the exceptions that should be identified, and the evidence auditors need to review.
Without a clear understanding of these requirements, automation initiatives can lose momentum, creating delays that limit the value organizations hope to achieve.
Where EagleEye365® Adds Value
EagleEye365® helps address this challenge by creating the foundation needed for successful control automation. Rather than focusing solely on automating the control itself, it helps organizations identify the systems, data elements, business logic, and evidence requirements that support the control objective.
With that foundation in place, evidence can be collected directly from underlying business and technology platforms through continuous monitoring rather than manually assembled by control owners. This creates a more repeatable process, strengthens evidence quality, and reduces the operational burden associated with audit and compliance activities. For many organizations, one of the most immediate benefits is a significant reduction in recurring evidence requests.
The Goal Is Not Faster PBC Responses
Leading organizations are not focused on helping employees respond to PBC requests a few minutes faster. Their objective is to reduce the need for those requests altogether.
When evidence already exists within enterprise applications, security platforms, and business systems, employees should not have to repeatedly locate, validate, and submit the same information when the same evidence is requested repeatedly across audits and compliance activities. Direct evidence collection enables a more efficient experience for the business while providing auditors with more reliable and consistent evidence.
The result is a rare win for both sides: less manual effort, higher-quality evidence, and fewer disruptions to the teams responsible for running the business.
Key Takeaway
If control owners are spending hundreds of hours each quarter responding to PBC requests, the issue is often not audit fatigue but a process that still relies heavily on manual evidence collection. Organizations seeing the greatest efficiency gains are moving away from evidence gathering as a people-driven activity and toward direct collection from the systems where the information already resides.
After all, when evidence already exists, collecting it shouldn’t be a full-time job.
FAQ’s
Prepared By Client (PBC) requests are requests from auditors for reports, screenshots, logs, approvals, and other documentation needed to test controls and validate compliance requirements during an audit.
Manual evidence collection requires control owners to gather information from multiple systems, verify its accuracy, and submit it to auditors. This process consumes significant time, increases the risk of errors, and can delay audit activities.
Automated evidence collection is the process of retrieving audit evidence directly from source systems such as ERP, IAM, HR, and service management platforms without requiring employees to manually compile and submit documentation.
By collecting evidence directly from source systems, organizations can reduce repetitive manual work, improve evidence consistency, accelerate control testing, and provide auditors with timely access to reliable information.
Continuous monitoring helps organizations identify control exceptions in real time, maintain audit-ready evidence, reduce audit preparation effort, improve compliance visibility, and support stronger risk management practices.
