Compliance is based upon complying with certain authority documents. This infers that each of our organizations, compliance vendors, and auditors have a consistent and meaningful naming structure to use when referencing any of these authority documents.

The use of informal or partial names to identify authority documents (such as referring to the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 as SOX) often leads to mis-representation (is the user referring to the Act itself, or the Act as codified in the US' Code of Federal Regulations), misinterpretation (there are differences between what is written in Acts versus what finally appears in the various regulations), and therefore miscommunication.

In order to end the miscommunication and automate compliance checks with the various authority documents, the Unified Compliance Framework™ team has developed and will continue to maintain a clear and consistent authority document naming scheme called UCF_AD_List.

UCF_AD_List is a structured naming scheme for all authority documents, their revisions, and addendums. The UCF_AD_List contains a formal naming format, an XML language for describing authority documents, and a method for checking names against the system.