Audit season turns senior engineers into librarians: weeks assembling evidence packs — access review records, policy attestations, change-management samples — from documents that existed all along but were never collected. The work is miserable precisely because it is recurring, structured, and deadline-driven: the exact profile of work that should be a pipeline and is instead a fire drill.
Worse, evidence assembled by hand has provenance problems. 'Where did this number come from and is it the current version?' is a question auditors ask and spreadsheets can't answer.