5 Common Mistakes in GRC and How to Avoid Them

Here's a scenario that plays out more often than anyone wants to admit. A company passes its first SOC 2 audit. High-fives all around. Then six months later, the auditor comes back — and half the evidence is stale, three control owners have left the company, and nobody can explain why a critical risk was marked "accepted" with no documentation.

GRC mistakes aren't rare. They're the norm. They show up as slow, compounding problems — missed deadlines, duplicated work, audit findings that could have been avoided, and executive conversations that go sideways because nobody has the numbers.

Most of these mistakes are completely preventable. They stem from the same handful of patterns: moving too fast without a plan, operating in silos, or treating compliance as a destination instead of an ongoing practice. Whether you're building your first compliance program or managing across multiple frameworks, this post covers the most common pitfalls — and practical steps to fix each one. If you're just getting started, our complete guide to GRC is a solid foundation before diving in here.

⚠️ Mistake 1: Not Understanding Your Regulatory Environment

This is the one that catches companies off guard the most. Not because they ignore regulations entirely — but because they have a partial or outdated understanding of what actually applies to them.

What this looks like in practice:

• A SaaS company expands into healthcare and doesn't realize HIPAA applies to them as a business associate
• A fintech startup assumes PCI DSS only matters if they "store" card data, missing that transmitting or processing it counts too
• A company gets acquired and inherits regulatory obligations nobody mapped

The regulatory environment isn't static. Your business changes — new markets, new customer segments, new data types. What was compliant last year may not be compliant today.

How to spot it: You can't name every regulation that applies to your business. Your compliance scope hasn't been reviewed in over 12 months. Customer questionnaires keep asking about frameworks you haven't evaluated.

How to fix it:

1. Conduct a regulatory applicability assessment. Map your business activities, data types, and geographies against known regulations. Our compliance framework comparison breaks down the five major frameworks side by side.
2. Subscribe to regulatory updates. Set up alerts from relevant bodies. Assign someone to review changes quarterly.
3. Review scope after every business change. New product line? New geography? New customer vertical? That triggers a scope review.
4. Train your team. Everyone who handles sensitive data needs a baseline understanding of what's required — not just the security team.

🎯 Mistake 2: Operating Without a Defined GRC Strategy

You'd be surprised how many companies "do compliance" without ever writing down what that means. They react to audits, respond to questionnaires, and put out fires — but there's no cohesive strategy connecting it all to business goals.

What this looks like in practice:

• The security team pursues SOC 2 because a prospect asked for it, but nobody evaluated whether ISO 27001 would have covered more ground
• Risk assessments happen ad hoc — when something goes wrong, not on a regular cadence
• Leadership can't answer "How mature is our compliance program?" or "What's our biggest risk right now?"

Without a strategy, GRC work becomes reactive instead of proactive. More scrambling, less building.

How to spot it: Different teams have different interpretations of your compliance posture. There's no document outlining your program's scope, objectives, and ownership. You keep saying "we'll formalize that later."

How to fix it:

1. Define your program's mission in one sentence. Something like: "Our GRC program exists to protect customer data, meet contractual and regulatory obligations, and reduce business risk."
2. Pick your frameworks deliberately. Don't chase every acronym. Choose based on customer requirements, regulatory obligations, and growth plans.
3. Assign ownership. Every control, every risk, every policy needs a named owner. Not a team. A person.
4. Set measurable goals. "Improve compliance" isn't a goal. "Achieve SOC 2 Type II by Q3 with zero critical findings" is. For guidance on which numbers matter, see GRC metrics executives care about.
5. Review quarterly. Business priorities shift. Your GRC strategy should shift with them.

🔍 Mistake 3: Not Prioritizing Risks

All risks are not created equal. But many organizations treat them like they are — giving the same attention to a low-likelihood, low-impact risk as they do to something that could shut down the business.

What this looks like in practice:

• A team spends weeks hardening a staging environment while a critical production database has no access reviews
• The risk register has 200 entries, all marked "medium"
• Leadership asks "what's our biggest risk?" and gets a different answer from every person in the room

Teams skip the scoring and prioritization step. They identify risks — which is good — but then fail to rank them in a way that drives action.

How to spot it: Your risk register hasn't been reviewed in the last quarter. Risks are documented but none have treatment plans or target dates.

How to fix it:

1. Use a consistent scoring model. Impact times likelihood is the classic approach. A 5x5 matrix works for most growing companies.
2. Force-rank your top risks. Not everything can be "medium." Pick your top 5 and make sure leadership has signed off.
3. Tie risks to business outcomes. "Unauthorized access to database" is a risk. "Unauthorized access to production customer database leading to breach notification and contract termination" is a risk the business understands.
4. Document treatment decisions. Accept, mitigate, transfer, or avoid — every risk needs a documented decision, an owner, and a review date. Platforms like episki keep your risk register, treatment plans, and evidence connected in one place so nothing falls through the cracks.

🤝 Mistake 4: Siloed Departments and Poor Collaboration

GRC is inherently cross-functional. It touches engineering, HR, legal, finance, IT, and leadership. But in most companies, compliance lives in one corner and everyone else treats it like someone else's problem.

What this looks like in practice:

• Engineering ships a feature that processes sensitive data, but nobody loops in compliance until a customer asks
• HR updates onboarding but forgets security awareness training
• Legal negotiates data handling requirements that nobody communicates to engineering
• IT decommissions a system without checking whether it was in the compliance scope

How to spot it: Control owners don't know they're control owners. Evidence collection is a scramble because the people who have the evidence aren't involved until audit prep.

How to fix it:

1. Make GRC visible. Compliance status, open risks, and deadlines should be accessible to everyone — not buried in a spreadsheet only the compliance manager can see.
2. Embed GRC into existing workflows. Integrate compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines, onboarding checklists, and change management processes.
3. Hold cross-functional reviews. Quarterly risk reviews should include engineering, HR, legal, and leadership. Not just the security team talking to itself.
4. Assign control owners across departments. If an HR policy is a control, HR owns it. If an engineering config is a control, an engineer owns it.
5. Use a shared platform. Shared drives and email threads don't scale. You need a single source of truth where tasks, evidence, and status live together. This is exactly the problem episki was built to solve — giving every stakeholder visibility into what's expected, what's done, and what's overdue.

💻 Mistake 5: Not Leveraging Technology Effectively

Some companies throw tools at the problem without a strategy. Others avoid tools entirely and try to run everything from spreadsheets. Both approaches fail at scale.

What this looks like in practice:

• A company buys an expensive GRC platform but only uses 10% of its features
• Evidence collection is entirely manual — someone takes a screenshot every quarter and uploads it to Google Drive
• The risk register lives in a spreadsheet that three people have conflicting copies of

How to spot it: Evidence collection takes more than a few hours per control per quarter. You're maintaining the same information in multiple places. The team dreads audit prep because it means weeks of manual work.

How to fix it:

1. Audit your current tooling. What's working? What's creating friction? Be honest about whether your tools are helping or adding complexity.
2. Prioritize integration over features. The best GRC tool connects to systems you already use — cloud provider, identity provider, ticketing system. Integrations turn manual evidence collection into automated workflows.
3. Automate evidence collection. If a control requires proof that MFA is enabled, that evidence should be pulled automatically — not screenshotted every 90 days. Build an evidence library that scales instead of a folder that grows.
4. Start simple and expand. You don't need every feature on day one. Start with control tracking, evidence management, and a risk register — then layer on automation as you mature.

🔄 Mistake 6: Treating Compliance as a One-Time Event

This might be the most dangerous mistake on the list — because it feels like success right before everything falls apart.

You pass the audit. You get the certificate. You celebrate. And then... nothing. Policies gather dust. Evidence gets stale. Control owners move to new roles. Six months later, you're scrambling again — except this time it's harder because you have to rebuild momentum from scratch.

Why this happens: Compliance programs often start as projects with a clear end date — "get SOC 2 by end of Q2." That framing is useful for deadlines, but it creates a dangerous illusion that compliance is something you finish.

It's not. Compliance is a continuous practice. Frameworks are designed around ongoing monitoring, regular reviews, and continuous improvement. The audit isn't the finish line. It's a checkpoint.

How to spot it: There's a "compliance season" at your company — a stressful sprint before each audit. Nobody looks at the risk register between audits. You've had repeat findings in consecutive cycles.

How to fix it:

1. Shift the mindset from project to program. Build monthly and quarterly rhythms — evidence reviews, control checks, risk updates — that keep the program alive year-round.
2. Automate monitoring. Set up automated evidence collection so you always know your current state, not just your state-at-audit.
3. Build compliance into performance expectations. If control ownership is part of someone's role, it should be part of their performance review.
4. Track freshness metrics. Know how much evidence is current, how many controls have been reviewed recently, and how many risks have active treatment plans. episki tracks this automatically — giving you a real-time view of your compliance posture, not a snapshot from the last audit.
5. Conduct internal reviews quarterly. Don't wait for the external auditor to find problems. Run your own mini-assessments to catch gaps early.

Wrapping Up: Build Habits, Not Just Programs

Every mistake on this list shares a common root — treating GRC as a thing you do when someone asks for it, rather than a discipline you practice continuously.

The companies that get compliance right build habits: regular risk reviews, clear ownership, automated evidence, cross-functional collaboration, and a strategy that evolves with the business.

Quick gut-check for your program:

• Regulatory awareness — Do you know every framework that applies today?
• Strategy — Can you articulate your GRC priorities for the next 12 months?
• Risk prioritization — Can you name your top 5 risks and their treatment plans?
• Collaboration — Do control owners outside security know what they're responsible for?
• Technology — Is evidence collection automated or still manual?
• Continuous practice — Does compliance work happen year-round or just before audits?

If you answered "no" to more than two, you've got work to do. But none of these are unsolvable. They just require intentionality.

Start with the one that's causing the most pain. Fix it. Build the habit. Then move to the next.

If you're tired of spreadsheets, stale evidence, and audit-season panic, give episki a try. We built it to make continuous compliance the default, not the exception. Start for free at episki.app and see what your program looks like when everything is connected.