Compliance Debt: A Taxonomy for Deferred Governance in Regulated Systems

Benedikt Kolbeinsson, Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson

Keywords: Compliance debt, Regulatory governance, Technical debt analogy, AI compliance, Continuous assurance, Risk management, Organisational oversight

Abstract: Organisations routinely defer compliance work, accumulating costs that compound over time. We introduce compliance debt as the accumulated cost required to achieve regulatory alignment after deferral and present a taxonomy classifying it by source (regulatory lag, architectural, documentation, process), visibility (explicit vs implicit) and scope (component vs systemic). This framework provides a structured vocabulary for diagnosing governance gaps and supports conceptualisation and future measurement of continuous oversight mechanisms.

Submission Number: 25