Compliance & regulation
An independent check of whether an organisation actually follows its own policies and the requirements it has signed up to.
Formal
A planned, documented and impartial examination that gathers evidence - samples, records, interviews - to judge whether practice matches set criteria such as policies, contracts, laws or a standard, and reports each deviation as a finding.
In plain English
Like the regular car inspection - the owner may say the brakes are fine, but the inspector puts the car on the test bench and checks for real.
In practice
An internal auditor at a Danish region picks twenty staff who left last year and finds that four still have active accounts in the patient system; the report lists it as a finding with a deadline.
Why it matters
Written rules slowly drift away from what people actually do; without a regular, independent check, nobody notices until an incident or a customer exposes the gap.