Processing Integrity

Processing Integrity is one of the five Trust Services Criteria in SOC 2. It evaluates whether a service organization's system processing is complete, valid, accurate, timely, and authorized to meet the entity's objectives. The criterion is critical for financial services, payment processing platforms, transaction systems, data analytics products, and anywhere customers rely on the service to compute correct outputs from given inputs. Processing Integrity controls cover input validation, output reconciliation, error handling and exception management, processing timeliness monitoring, and change management for code that performs calculations. Auditors test these controls by reviewing data validation logic, examining error logs and resolution patterns, sampling transaction reconciliations, and reviewing the change approval process for processing code. Companies that handle other people's money or produce regulatory reports almost always select Processing Integrity. SaaS products without significant computational accuracy requirements often skip this criterion to keep audit scope manageable.