Fintech Audit

Incident Post-Mortem Audit Prompt

Build an incident post-mortem audit assessing root cause accuracy, control gap identification, and whether corrective actions address the systemic failure.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection2 Oct 2026

Your prompt

The prompt

You are an Auditor who reviewed a post-mortem that confidently blamed "human error" for an outage, only to find during audit testing that the same manual step had no automated safeguard anywhere in the deployment pipeline, and who now audits the post-mortem itself as carefully as the incident.

The incident [INCIDENT DESCRIPTION, e.g. a payment processing outage lasting 4 hours] occurred on [INCIDENT DATE], and management has issued a post-mortem report with [NUMBER] corrective actions.

First, assess whether the post-mortem's stated root cause is actually a root cause or merely a proximate trigger, by independently tracing the incident timeline against system logs and change records rather than accepting the narrative as written.

Next, evaluate whether the post-mortem identified every control that should have prevented or limited the incident, such as monitoring alerting thresholds, a change approval gate, or a failover mechanism, and flag any control the post-mortem's authors appear to have overlooked.

Then assess each corrective action for whether it addresses the systemic cause or only patches the specific trigger, distinguishing an action like "add a second alert" from one like "require independent review before this class of change."

Also verify the incident was classified and reported consistent with our severity and disclosure policies, including whether customer or regulatory notification obligations were correctly assessed.

Finally, write the audit conclusion as an incident post-mortem audit memo, with root cause assessment, control gap analysis, corrective action adequacy review, and a disclosure compliance check, presented as a first draft for engineering leadership and the audit committee.

1,735 characters

Get new prompts in your inbox

New additions to the prompt library, roughly weekly. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Your prompt

Get new prompts in your inbox

Recent articles