financial system. The audit report indicates that the accounts receivable department has not followed proper record disposal procedures during a COOP/BCP tabletop exercise involving manual…

Waiting for external audit results is a passive response that does not remediate the identified deficiency and delays corrective action unnecessarily.

Performing another COOP exercise before fixing the underlying training and procedure gaps would simply repeat the same failure without addressing its root cause.

Mandatory training directly addresses the human factor - employees in accounts receivable did not follow established disposal procedures, indicating a knowledge or compliance gap that training can correct. Pairing training with a procedure review ensures the written policies accurately reflect required steps and are realistic to follow during manual processing scenarios. Together these two controls address both the people and process dimensions of the compliance failure identified in the audit.

Destroying the financial transactions from the exercise is premature and potentially harmful to audit evidence; records may be needed for the audit and should be disposed of only through the correct approved procedures.