Regulatory changes are happening at a pace that leaves many businesses struggling to keep up and vulnerable to compliance gaps. According to a 2025 Nasdaq Global Compliance survey, only 19% of compliance professionals feel their organizations are fully prepared for regulatory changes.
For most organizations, the process for keeping up with regulatory updates is informal at best. While they don’t deliberately disregard regulatory requirements, the lack of a structured, accountable process for tracking regulatory changes and acting on them can lead to noncompliance.
Key Takeaways
- Regulatory changes are increasing rapidly, leaving many businesses exposed to compliance gaps due to lack of structured processes.
- Organizations often struggle to track regulatory updates manually, leading to potential noncompliance and associated risks.
- A structured regulatory change management process should include monitoring, assessment, implementation, verification, and reporting.
- Common mistakes in compliance management include siloed ownership, manual processes, and treating compliance as a periodic event.
- Using an automated GRC tool can enhance compliance by providing centralized monitoring, risk assessments, and real-time audit trails.
Table of Contents
- How Regulatory Change Creates Compliance Gaps
- The Visibility Problem: You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See
- What a Structured Regulatory Change Management Process Looks Like
- Common Regulatory Change Management Mistakes
- Picking the Right Tool for Regulatory Change Management
- Close Compliance Gaps With Proactive Regulatory Change Management
How Regulatory Change Creates Compliance Gaps
Regulatory changes can originate from several sources, making it difficult to track and assess new compliance obligations. In 2023, for example, a Thomson Reuters survey showed that 234 new regulations were issued every day across industries. These alerts arrived through:
- Federal Register updates
- Agency guidance documents
- State-level amendments
- Industry body bulletins
- Court rulings that reinterpret existing rules
Tracking all these regulatory alerts can be a full-time job. If you don’t have the right GRC software, your team sees updates arriving faster than they can keep up.
The problem compounds when you consider that a single update can impact multiple departments. For instance, a change in data security requirements can affect the IT, legal, compliance and human resources departments. If you don’t have a structured process for communicating regulatory changes and verifying updates, it’s easy for everyone to assume someone else handled it.
Left unattended, missed or misapplied regulatory changes introduce compliance gaps. They can result in fines, remediation costs and reputational damage. In regulated industries like financial institutions, they can also result in the potential loss of an operating license.
The Visibility Problem: You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See
Most organizations build their compliance infrastructure around known requirements rather than tracking regulatory changes. If your program can map internal controls to a fixed set of rules, you’ll remain compliant as long as those rules stay fixed. When shifts in the regulatory framework occur, your program will have no mechanism to detect the gap.
Manual tracking creates several visibility problems across key compliance areas. Common issues include:
- Lack of a centralized register of applicable regulations, making it unclear which requirements apply to your business
- Inconsistent monitoring of regulatory sources, so updates depend on whoever notices them
- No audit trail connecting regulatory changes to the actions taken, limiting proof of what you’ve done and when
- No accountability loop to confirm relevant changes were made
What a Structured Regulatory Change Management Process Looks Like
To close compliance gaps, your program should integrate compliance gap analysis into every stage of the process. While your process will vary depending on your organization, here are the critical components of a well-structured regulatory change management program.
Monitoring
Assign a GRC team member to monitor changes in regulatory frameworks that apply to your business. Clear ownership and accountability for identifying regulatory updates ensure your organization doesn’t miss any updates.
Assessment
Whenever your GRC team identifies a change, they need a defined risk assessment process. Establish how your organization will compare the new or amended requirements against your current internal policies and controls to identify compliance gaps. A structured risk assessment approach ensures you’re evaluating the severity, scope and urgency of each change, not just logging that it exists.
Implementation
For every gap you identify, assign a GRC team member to oversee the required update. Clear ownership allows you to track every remediation task through completion, including:
- Internal policy updates
- Internal control revisions
- Staff retraining
- System modifications
Set deadlines that fit the regulatory timelines.
Verification
Once you’ve applied an update, check that your updated controls are functioning as intended. Confirming this step means you’re meeting the new compliance requirements.
Reporting
You should document every step of the process to help your leadership understand what’s happening and build the audit trail that proves your compliance program is functioning. When auditors ask for evidence that your organization responded to specific regulatory changes, your audit trail is a great answer.
Common Regulatory Change Management Mistakes
When adapting to regulatory changes, it’s easy to make mistakes that hinder the successful adoption of new requirements. Here are the most common mistakes to help inform your regulatory change management program.
Siloed Ownership
In some organizations, different departments monitor their own slice of regulatory changes without a shared system to surface and route changes. One department can make a change that’s never formally assessed for compliance implications. For instance, the finance team may notea tax compliance change, such as an update to tax systems or reporting obligations, but it doesn’t trigger a review of internal controls or a broader impact assessment across affected compliance frameworks.
Manual Processes
Spreadsheets and shared drives can only track what you’ve identified, but can’t enforce accountability, flag overdue tasks or produce clean audit trails. They also require someone to actively maintain them, which can strain your GRC team, given that compliance teams are under pressure to keep up with the shifting regulations.
Treating Compliance as a Calendar Event
Most organizations review their regulatory exposure periodically, which only surfaces gaps during the reviews. By then, the window for orderly remediation has often closed.
Picking the Right Tool for Regulatory Change Management
It’s nearly impossible to keep up with rapid regulatory changes with manual processes. The U.S. Federal Register alone hit a record 106,109 pages of new regulations in 2024, the highest count ever. That same year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) collected $8.2 billion in penalties, the highest amount in SEC history.
To stay compliant and cut costs, you need an automated tool. Here are key features to look for when evaluating a GRC platform for regulatory change management.
Centralized Regulatory Inventory
Your regulatory change management platform should allow you to list all the current applicable regulations and who’s responsible for them in your company. You should also be able to map the controls to each regulatory requirement in a single, accessible place for every relevant team.
Automated Monitoring
Manual monitoring places the burden of catching regulatory changes on individual team members, so updates only get noticed when someone happens to be looking. Your governance, risk and compliance platform should automatically scan relevant regulatory sources and alert the right people when changes occur, without manual intervention.
Risk and Impact Assessment Workflows
When your compliance management tool flags changes, it should support automatic compliance gap analysis. Your solution should run the new requirements against your existing controls and policies to identify gaps. From the analysis, your GRC team gets a clear picture of what needs to change and how urgently.
Task Management with Deadlines
For every gap, your GRC tool should offer clear remediation steps with a defined owner and a deadline tied to the regulatory timeline. It should make it easy to track status for every task in real time, so updates don’t stall between assignment and completion.
Real-Time Audit Trails
Your regulatory change management tool should capture a complete, time-stamped record for every action you take in response to regulatory changes. It should record:
- When you identify the change
- What assessments you perform
- Which controls or policies you update
- Who approved each step
A complete audit trail makes it easier to prove compliance and respond to audit requests with confidence.
Close Compliance Gaps With Proactive Regulatory Change Management
Laws and regulations will continue to change to address emerging risks and help keep competition fair. At Onspring, we’ll help you keep pace with these changes and avoid compliance gaps. We offer a centralized compliance management platform to track regulatory changes so you don’t have to rely on manual monitoring or disconnected processes.
When our system identifies a change, it helps map against your controls to highlight affected areas and support risk assessment across your compliance frameworks. You can also easily assign ownership and maintain a complete audit trail, so your compliance program is always audit-ready.
Download our ebook Creating a Culture of Audit Readiness today to learn more about building a more auditable compliance program.
