Start with a documentation review
Most audit findings trace back to missing or inconsistent documentation, not actual non-compliance. Before anything else, confirm that employment contracts, statutory filings and remittance records are complete and stored somewhere they can be retrieved quickly.
A useful exercise: pick five employees at random and try to assemble their full compliance file in under ten minutes. If you can't, that's the gap an audit will find first.
Reconcile statutory remittances
Deductions and remittances should reconcile cleanly against payroll records for every pay period under review. Gaps between what was deducted and what was actually remitted are one of the most common and most costly audit findings.
Run this reconciliation quarterly rather than waiting for an audit to trigger it — catching a discrepancy early is far cheaper than explaining it after the fact.
Review policies against actual practice
Auditors don't just check whether policies exist; they check whether the business actually follows them. A leave policy that's written down but routinely ignored is arguably a bigger red flag than having no policy at all.
Walk through your core HR policies — leave, overtime, termination — and confirm each one reflects what actually happens on the ground.
Get ahead of it with a workforce consultant
A pre-audit review by an experienced HR or compliance consultant typically surfaces the same gaps a real audit would, while there's still time to fix them without penalty. It's a small investment against a significant risk.
Organisations that treat compliance review as a routine, scheduled activity — rather than a reaction to a notice — consistently perform better when an actual audit happens.
