As companies grow and scale, certain tedious, unglamorous, yet critical tasks quietly accumulate. Much like how engineering teams grapple with technical debt, companies must regularly revisit and refine their compliance processes. What worked smoothly a few months ago can quickly evolve into a potential roadblock if left unchecked.

We see this with setups that adopt quick-fix solutions to address immediate problems. Over time, these "band-aid" fixes morph into complex, messy workflows. This pattern is common in areas like compliance, incident follow-ups, onboarding checklists, and software procurement—often cross-functional, unsavoury, and time-intensive tasks.

How Compliance Debt Accumulates

Take compliance. It usually begins small—just a couple of approvals or audits here and there. Someone casually asks for your team's input or participation, and you oblige.

Fast-forward a few months, and suddenly, your team is dealing with multiple evidence reqs, checklists, and deadlines. The kicker? The process was likely designed by an ex-employee with limited oversight and meant for a very different context. You investigate, only to find a convoluted system that everyone disowns:

• “Do I need to be a part of this process?”
• “Check with someone else, I am not quite sure why.”
• Shrug.

$13M in headcount spending 1% of their collective time on an outdated, overly complex process. It’s a silent drain on productivity.

Intentions Matter

It's important to call out that this occurs despite the best of intentions. While compliance teams are sometimes labeled as bureaucratic, the reality is that most compliance professionals are doing their best to help colleagues operate effectively and ethically. However, outdated tools and fragmented workflows can make this goal nearly impossible to achieve.

Compliance processes often become entangled with unnecessary complexity, largely because they were built to accommodate the limitations of legacy systems.

Start Afresh

Compliance debt isn’t irreversible. The first step to paying it off is to step back and reimagine your processes from scratch.

1. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Sketch out your current compliance workflows as if you were designing them for the first time, without any preconceived notions or legacy constraints.
2. Compare it to your existing processes. Does your new design resemble what your team currently does? If the answer is yes, then congratulations—you’re in good shape.
3. If not, it’s time for a reset. Identify redundancies, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies in your current setup and start improving.

A real-world example

We worked with a fast-scaling SaaS company navigating SOC 2 compliance. Initially, they adopted a generic compliance automation tool to streamline SOC 2 readiness, which worked reasonably well when they were undergoing their first audit. Back then, SOC 2 readiness consumed 50% of their compliance team’s time, but it was manageable given the scope of the work.

However, as the company grew, regulatory demands expanded. New privacy requirements, industry-specific ISO frameworks and regulations like GDPR were added, and the team found themselves struggling to manage the additional workload. Their generic compliance tool, while adequate for basic SOC 2 readiness, couldn’t handle the complexity of these evolving workflows.

Faced with limitations, the team reverted to manual processes—emails, spreadsheets, and ad hoc communication—leading to inefficiencies, misaligned priorities, and mounting frustration. The hidden cost? Hours spent on repetitive tasks and coordinating between departments, which could have been avoided with a tool designed for scalability and multi-framework compliance management.

You know you’re doing compliance right when it’s no longer the most important thing on your plate. Simplicity is the ultimate benchmark