Evidence Debt Compounding

Evidence Debt Compounding treats every control proven by hand as a small loan against future delivery capacity. A screenshot pasted into a spreadsheet, a policy PDF emailed to an auditor, an access review completed in a shared doc: each one clears today's requirement while accruing interest in the form of re-collection next cycle, drift between what the document says and what the systems actually do, and a scramble when a client's procurement team asks for proof mid-quarter. Agencies feel this hardest because evidence work is unbillable until it blocks a deal. The framework asks a simple question of every control: does this proof regenerate itself, or does a person rebuild it each time? Vanta and Drata both answer by pulling continuous signal from AWS, GitHub, Okta, and Slack rather than waiting for a human to assemble artifacts, while Sprinto extends the same logic to 200+ frameworks. The compounding effect is asymmetric: ten manual controls cost ten times at renewal, not twice.