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Supervisory actions & the advisory log

Updated 2026-10-07

Two surfaces serve institutions that need them. Supervisory actions, in the Exams & regulatory change group of the sidebar, is the container for a formal action against your institution. That can be a consent order, a formal or written agreement, an MOU, a cease-and-desist order, or a set of matters requiring attention. Advisory log, in the Compliance group, is the register of "can we do this?" questions the business brings compliance and the positions compliance took. They are documented together because both answer the same examination question: what did you know, and what did you do about it.

An action carries its type, the issuing agency, the docket number where there is one, the effective date, an owner and a short summary. Its status runs issued, awaiting termination, terminated, or superseded. Your team files it with File a formal action, entering the header and the articles the agency wrote, and adds more with Add an article and dated milestones with Add a milestone. An MRA set can also arrive promoted from an examination's close-out, described in Exam management & audit readiness.

Underneath the action sit the articles the agency actually wrote, each with its number, its title, the requirement in the agency's words, and an owner. Under each article sit dated milestones, each with an owner and a due date. Every level rolls up: milestones complete against milestones total, articles complete against articles total, a percentage, an overdue count and the next date due. The register lists your actions with those rollups and filters by status, so the answer to "how far along are we" is the same number at every level rather than three different ones.

An article can carry an action plan in the work layer, so the day-to-day remediation is tracked as tasks while the article keeps the agency-facing deadline it exists for. Open an action plan on the article creates it with an owner and its first tasks. The article then shows the plan and its task count and links through to it. An article has at most one live plan, so "the plan for Article III" stays a well-posed question.

Working an article to done

Articles and milestones both move through open, in progress, complete and cancelled, and a completed or cancelled one can be reopened. Three rules are enforced rather than left to good intentions.

Completing a milestone requires evidence. If nothing is attached, Zovos asks for it before recording the completion. The evidence can be a note naming what proves the work was done, such as the minutes, the filing or the memo, or a document already in the library. "Done" with no pointer is the claim an examiner discounts.

An article cannot be completed while any of its milestones is still open, because a rollup that says otherwise is a number that means nothing. The action itself cannot move to awaiting termination while any article is still open, because you do not ask an agency to terminate an order you have not finished.

You amend the action from the screen, to correct its header or to move it to awaiting termination and then terminated. Recording a termination requires the agency's termination date and a rationale, and Zovos stamps who recorded it from the signed-in session.

Agencies increasingly want remediation validated and sustained before they terminate an order, and an action can be set up to require both. When require article validation is on, an article cannot be completed until someone independent of the work has validated it. Open an independent validation names the validating line, internal audit or second line, and the procedure. Conclude the validation records the outcome. Internal audit concludes from a reviewed workpaper and the second line from a filed document. The article's owner, the action's owner and anyone who completed the article or its milestones cannot validate it.

A sustainability period in days sets how long every validated article must hold before the action can move to awaiting termination. Both settings can be amended while the order runs, and tightening them does not reopen articles already completed.

Progress reports submitted to the issuing agency are logged against the action: the period covered, the date submitted, who it went to, and a note. Log a progress report records one your team wrote. Generate a progress report has Zovos compose the period's figures from live article, milestone, remediation, validation and board-oversight status and file them as a sealed PDF, dated the day it was produced. The log is create-only, so the submission history is a record rather than a working document.

Milestone dates ride the same obligations calendar and reminder feed as every other deadline in Zovos. An open milestone on a live action appears there as it comes due and again once it is overdue, naming the action, the article, the agency and the owner. Dates are read against your institution's own calendar date, so one deadline reads the same on the action, on the calendar and in a reminder.

This is the one oversight surface an examiner in an active session can read, and that is deliberate. The examiner supervising a consent order is the party the order is for, and hiding your progress from them would be theatre.

It is filtered hard. Every examiner grant names its regulator, and an examiner sees only actions issued by their own agency, so one agency's confidential supervisory information never reaches another agency's session. Every write is denied, and examiner mode stays read-only.

The advisory log is the register of second-line advisory work. Each entry records the question in the business's words, the business unit that asked, who asked, the topic, and the date received. An open question shows how long it has been waiting.

Answering it records the position compliance took, the rationale behind it, the authority relied on, and who answered. The rationale is required, because an answer with no reasoning evidences nothing. The authority can be a citation from the shipped corpus or a label you type, such as an agency FAQ. A question that was withdrawn is recorded as withdrawn rather than deleted.

An answered question can link the outcomes it led to: a governing document, a training program, a monitoring activity or a finding. The log filters on whether an outcome has been recorded, and an outcome that is removed is retired rather than deleted. A maintained advisory log is textbook self-identification evidence. It shows an institution that finds and resolves its own questions before they become findings. Unlike supervisory actions, it is not visible to examiner sessions at all. Advisory entries hold candid pre-decisional reasoning, so an institution that wants to show the log to an examiner produces it deliberately.

The advisory log is written by your compliance team. There is no employee-facing intake queue and no ticketing workflow. Zovos is scoped to the GRC team, and a bank-wide help desk is a different product.

Both surfaces sit in the same permission family as findings. Reading either needs findings read access, and working either needs findings write access. Milestone work, article action plans and the remediation behind them run through the shared machinery described in Findings & remediation, and the examiner side of the story is covered in Exam management & audit readiness.