There are two primary areas for which audits may be performed to ensure compliance with laws and rules related to the WA-APCD.

(1) Audits may be performed to determine if data suppliers are in compliance with the requirements for the submission of data to the WA-APCD including, but not limited to:

(a) Compliance with the data submission guide including, but not limited to, accuracy of financial fields;

(b) Data integrity, as opposed to data quality checks that the data vendor performs using thresholds and variances;

(c) Finding data that is missing or being withheld from submission into the WA-APCD; and

(d) Documenting the process for determining the number of Washington covered persons for each line of business in order to ensure that data suppliers are not artificially creating lines of business with small numbers of covered lives in order to meet the minimum threshold for exclusion to report.

(2) Audits can be performed to determine whether requestors who receive data from the WA-APCD are in compliance with the data release requirements or agreements, whether provided datasets or licenses to the data enclave including, but not limited to:

(a) For physical datasets, compliance with data use agreements, confidentiality agreements, compliance with collecting, storing, analyzing, and destroying the data; and

(b) For data enclave licenses, compliance with data use agreements, confidentiality agreements, compliance with analyzing, storing, destroying, and user license access to the data.

(3) For purposes of this section, the following definitions apply:

(a) "Data quality checks" means the extent to which data is missing or the data conforms with the data format requirements; and

(b) "Data integrity checks" means the completeness and validity of the submitted data, whether the submitted values are consistent with the instructions and intent of the data submission guide.