What an auditor is really checking

The NDIS Practice Standards — including the SIL Practice Standards for providers now required to register for SIL from 1 July 2026 — describe outcomes for participants and the governance that supports them. An auditor samples participants and workers, reads your policies, then checks that the records show those policies being followed: that service agreements were in place, that risks were assessed, that incidents were managed and that workers were screened and trained.

The gap auditors find most often isn’t a missing policy. It’s a policy that says one thing and records that show another.

Where providers usually come up short

Each of these is easy to fix in the moment and hard to fix the week before an audit.

• Service agreements unsigned, out of date, or not matching the supports actually delivered
• Risk assessments and support plans not reviewed when a participant’s needs changed
• Incidents recorded but with no follow-up, root cause or closure
• Worker Screening Checks, WWCC, first aid and other credentials expired or unverified
• Progress notes that don’t connect the support delivered to the participant’s goals
• Complaints handled by phone and never written down

Make evidence a by-product of the work

The reliable fix is to capture evidence at the point the work happens. A worker can’t be rostered if their screening has expired. A shift can’t be checked out without a progress note. An incident can’t be closed without a review. When the system enforces the policy, the records match it by default.

In CompanionAxis, the compliance hub maps your records to the Practice Standards, so you can see which participants are missing a current service agreement or risk assessment, and which workers have credentials due to expire, long before an auditor asks.

Run your own sample first

A few weeks out, pick participants and workers at random, the way an auditor would. Walk each one through intake, service agreement, plans, notes, incidents and reviews. Every gap you find is one the auditor won’t.

Keep a register of what you found and what you changed. Continuous improvement is itself something the Practice Standards ask you to show.

On the day

Give the auditor a named contact and read-only access to the records they sample, rather than printing folders. Being able to show the audit log of who changed what, and when, answers many questions before they’re asked.