An auditor asks who owns a responsibility in your management system. The procedure names a role that was removed in the last reorganisation.
Someone now has to work out which current role took on that work, and show the evidence. That usually means reading several procedures and finding the people who were there when the organisation changed. The responsibility may have moved intact, been split between two roles, or not moved at all.
HSE's guidance on organisational change asks operators to identify the tasks and responsibilities affected and make sure they transfer to the new organisation. Read HSE's guidance. Answering the auditor is one test of whether that happened.
Write the question down first
Before anyone opens a document, write down the question, who needs the answer and by when. For example: who now owns the responsibilities of the role removed in the restructure?
The question decides which roles and documents are in scope. Agree the document revisions at the same time, and record anything you expected to find and could not. If the answer rests on a selection of procedures, it should say so.
Keep the sentence that assigns the work
Responsibilities often carry conditions. A supervisor may approve a permit only when the usual approver is absent. A one-line summary in a spreadsheet loses that condition, and the ownership decision can go wrong because of it.
Synapse extracts documented responsibilities, maps them to roles where the source supports that mapping, and keeps the verbatim source text and document reference for each accepted assignment. The reviewer reads each assignment beside the sentence it came from, then accepts it, corrects it or raises a question. A role reference that cannot be resolved stays visible until someone investigates it.
Agree who decides, and how much time they have
Each finding needs a decision from someone who understands the work and has the authority to make it. Their time is usually the limit on how much a review can cover.
Agree which findings they will see first, and how much they can review, before the documents are processed. Keep reviewed and outstanding items separate throughout, so nobody reading the result treats the whole source set as settled.
Correct the documents as a separate step
An accepted ownership decision may mean a procedure needs changing. Record the document, the passage, the agreed correction and who will take it through your document control. Your document-management system stays the controlled copy.
What the documents cannot tell you
A quoted procedure shows what the procedure says. Whether the role still exists, whether someone accepted the work, and whether they have the competence and time to do it all need current organisational information and a person's judgement. Using Synapse does not certify compliance or guarantee that an audit response will be accepted.
The auditor needs a specific answer: the documented responsibility, who owns it now, the evidence behind that decision and any action still open. Where the owner is still unresolved, the answer should say so and name who is finding out.