When the audit interviews end and the audit team packs up their laptops, most entities breathe a sigh of relief. But the audit isn’t over, not by a long shot. What happens next is often more important than the audit itself, because this is where entities either turn findings into meaningful improvements or let them fester into repeat violations. In part 2 of our NERC CIP Audit Series, we discussed what happens during a NERC CIP audit and best practices along the way. In this last part of the series, we are going to talk about what happens Post NERC CIP audit around lessons learned and other best practices.
As former NERC CIP auditors, we always reminded compliance managers that the end of the audit week is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the next chapter in your NERC CIP journey. One that will shape your compliance culture, your operational risk posture, and your relationship with regulators for years to come.
The Exit Meeting: First Impressions of Results
Every audit concludes with an exit meeting, where auditors share preliminary observations. Auditors review what went well, where potential violations were found, and what areas might need clarification.
At this stage, nothing is final. But how you respond sets the tone for the entire post-audit process. The best compliance teams listened carefully, took notes, and asked clarifying questions without becoming defensive. They understood that early transparency helped them shape stronger mitigation plans later.
Others fell into the trap of arguing every point. That rarely helped, auditors aren’t going to reverse preliminary findings in an exit meeting. All it did was waste time and signal to us that the entity wasn’t prepared to own its issues.
The Formal Findings
After the audit, entities receive the final audit report, which includes:
- Areas of Concern (AOCs): Not violations, but indicators of potential weaknesses. A warning shot that tells you where auditors see risk.
- Potential Non-Compliances (PNCs): Formal findings where the entity did not meet the requirements. These often trigger mitigation and, depending on severity, potential penalties.
From the auditor’s perspective, findings are not meant to be punishments. They’re risk indicators. But from the entity’s perspective, they can feel like judgment. That’s where mindset matters: treat findings as opportunities to strengthen your NERC CIP compliance program, not scars to hide.
Responding to Findings
The next step is responding to findings through mitigation plans and corrective actions. This is where entities often revealed the maturity of their compliance culture.
Strong Responses Looked Like This:
- Clear, actionable steps to address the root cause.
- Defined owners and timelines for remediation.
- Supporting evidence that changes were already underway.
Weak Responses Looked Like This:
- Vague promises to “review policies.”
- No clear accountability.
- Band-aid fixes that didn’t address systemic issues.
As former auditors, we respected entities that admitted mistakes openly and showed they were already taking steps to fix them. That honesty built trust and often led to smoother follow-ups.
Common Post-Audit Pitfalls
Looking back, we saw patterns in how entities stumbled after audits:
- Treating mitigation as paperwork. Some teams thought sending in a mitigation plan was enough. But if auditors returned later and saw the same problem, trust around the developed plan eroded quickly.
- Delaying corrective actions. Waiting until just before the deadline to implement fixes often led to rushed, incomplete solutions.
- Ignoring Areas of Concern. AOCs weren’t formal violations, but ignoring them often meant they turned into PNCs the next audit cycle.
- Poor internal communication. Leadership didn’t always get the full picture of findings, which meant compliance teams fought uphill battles to get resources for remediation.
Lessons Learned from the Auditor’s Notebook
After years of audits, some lessons became crystal clear.
Compliance Is a Continuous Cycle
Entities that treated compliance as an ongoing discipline, not an event, were almost always better positioned for success. The audit simply confirmed what they were already doing. Those who treated compliance as “audit season” struggled every time.
Culture Matters More Than Checklists
I saw entities with perfect documentation still struggle because their people weren’t aligned. Conversely, entities with some gaps thrived because their staff embraced compliance as part of daily work. Culture always showed up in interviews and evidence.
Don’t Fear Findings, Fear Inaction
Findings aren’t the enemy. They happen to every entity. The real risk is failing to act on them. The strongest entities embraced findings as opportunities to tighten controls and improve resilience.
Automation Is No Longer Optional
Over 10 years ago, compliance teams relied almost entirely on spreadsheets, shared drives, and late-night hunts for screenshots. That world is gone. With the complexity of CIP requirements today, manual processes almost guarantee gaps. Entities that embraced automation reduced errors, built audit-ready programs, and made life easier for everyone including auditors. NERC CIP compliance automation platforms like NovaSync help compliance teams stay organized and consistent.
Best Practices Moving Forward
The entities that improved after audits didn’t just fix problems; they built systems that learned from them. They began by capturing lessons immediately. Within days of the audit ending, they gathered compliance staff and SMEs to debrief while everything was still fresh in everyone’s minds. That immediacy mattered. Waiting months meant the context faded and subtle details got lost.
They also looked deeper than the findings themselves. Instead of patching individual issues, they asked why they happened. Was it human error, a broken process, or a technology gap? The entities that treated root cause analysis as a core practice rarely saw the same mistakes repeat.
Tracking corrective actions was another hallmark of strong programs. The best teams made progress visible, assigning owners and deadlines to every action item. Nothing disappeared into a spreadsheet; accountability was built into their workflow. They kept leadership informed too. Executives don’t like surprises, and when they understood what was being addressed and why, they were far more likely to allocate resources quickly.
Finally, these organizations turned every audit finding into a teaching moment. They folded lessons learned into internal training programs so that new staff inherited not only policies and procedures, but also the wisdom earned through past mistakes. That habit built a culture where compliance wasn’t just managed, it was understood.
How Automation Strengthens the Post-Audit Phase
Modern compliance automation changed how this post-audit process looked. Instead of chasing updates or managing endless versions of evidence, NERC CIP GRC platforms like NovaSync allowed entities to track everything in real time. Findings could be assigned directly to owners, deadlines monitored automatically, and remediation evidence captured as soon as actions were completed.
Automation also created a feedback loop that prevented repeat issues. Continuous monitoring flagged potential non-compliances early, giving teams a chance to correct them before the next audit cycle. The result was a shift from reactive to proactive compliance, a steady rhythm rather than a scramble.
From my perspective as a former auditor, this evolution was noticeable. When entities used integrated systems to manage their post-audit work, their trajectory always looked stronger. They weren’t just fixing findings, they were maturing as organizations. Automation didn’t just make compliance easier; it made it continuous.
After the Audit and Beyond
Looking back, the true measure of an audit was never the number of findings. It was what the entity did afterward. Some treated the report like a checklist, just another set of boxes to tick before moving on. Others saw it as a chance to grow, using findings as fuel to strengthen their processes and people.
The entities that thrived understood that an audit isn’t the end of the story, it’s a checkpoint in a much longer journey. When lessons are absorbed, when compliance becomes part of everyday operations, and when every finding turns into progress, the next audit stops feeling like a storm on the horizon. It becomes a routine test of a system that’s already working.
That’s what maturity looks like in compliance: not perfection, but readiness.