Signature Audit

A six-question inventory applied to every automated process that produces a decision about a specific person. The name is the point. Decisions like these used to carry a signature, and the signature was never a formality. It was the moment the company worked out who was on the hook.

Where it came from

A leasing agent declines an application in ninety seconds. Ask who decided and she will tell you the system said decline, which is an accurate description of what happened. Ask everyone above her and every answer is also true. The vendor provides information. The manager applied approved criteria. The owner hired professionals so it would not be making these calls one unit at a time. The regional VP had full authority to override. A chain ends somewhere. That one closes into a circle.

When to run this

Before a regulator or a plaintiff's firm runs it for you. The same inventory done under discovery is the same inventory, on somebody else's calendar, in the shape of your worst quarter.

The steps

Start by counting, and be strict about what counts. Not every process with software in it. The ones where a system produces a recommendation about a specific person and somebody accepts it. Most businesses have five or six. Short enough to inventory in an afternoon, long enough that nobody has.

For each one, six questions:

What is the decision? Not the tool. Not the use case. Screening is a process. Deny this application is a decision. Only one of the two can be handed to a person.

Who owns it, by name? Not a department. Not a committee. Not a vendor. Someone whose bonus moves when the outcome moves.

Is the override real? Pull the rate. Near zero across thousands of decisions means the criteria are carrying the decision, not your people.

Can you explain a denial to the person you denied? Plain language, thirty days, without calling the vendor.

What would you hand over in discovery? The test is not whether the framework exists. It is whether the paper it throws off backs up your story.

Where did the contract move the decision? Read the indemnification clause beside the product description.

What a bad answer looks like

Two answers come back more often than any others, and both are findings rather than dead ends.

The vendor citing proprietary logic. Ask for the business necessity basis for a threshold and you may get trade secret in reply. Take the refusal as your answer. A rule you cannot explain to an applicant or a regulator is a rule that has taken authority you cannot defend, and the contract protecting the vendor's model does nothing to protect you.

No owner at all. It comes back as a committee, a vendor default, or somebody who left in 2021.

What to do with the output

Where there is no owner, assign the name that week. Give it to the P&L leader whose budget carries the workflow, with authority to reaffirm the current thresholds or pause them. An interim owner who reaffirms a threshold has made a decision. An empty box has not.

Then put the assumptions on a review schedule at the same cadence as any other material policy.