Most discussions about regulatory compliance focus on what you're allowed to do with data — consent requirements, data subject rights, cross-border transfer restrictions. But there's a quieter requirement that runs through GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, SOX, and virtually every other data regulation: the data itself must be accurate, complete, and maintainable.
This is a data quality requirement embedded in regulatory frameworks — and most compliance teams overlook it.
The Accuracy Requirements in Major Regulations
GDPR Article 5(1)(d): Personal data must be "accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date."
Sohovi automatically detects PII in your datasets — emails, phone numbers, SSNs — all processed client-side so your data never leaves the browser.
HIPAA: Protected health information must be accurate enough to support treatment and billing decisions. Inaccurate health records can cause patient harm — which is both a clinical and a legal problem.
SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley): Financial data used in reporting must be accurate and the controls that produce it must be documented and tested. Bad financial data quality is a controls failure.
CCPA: The right to know and the right to delete both require that you can find all personal data about a specific individual — which requires your data to be de-duplicated and your identifiers to be consistent.
Sohovi automatically finds every duplicate in your dataset — including near-matches — and shows you exactly which rows are affected.
How Poor Data Quality Creates Compliance Risk
Inaccurate records: Sending marketing email to an email address that belongs to a different person than the one in your record is a GDPR accuracy failure. Marketing to a California resident who has opted out because their opt-out record is attached to a duplicate and the send went to the primary record is a CCPA failure.
Inability to fulfill data subject requests: If a customer requests deletion of their personal data and you can't find all their records because they exist under three different email addresses in three different systems — you've failed to fulfill a legal obligation.
Inaccurate financial reporting: Revenue figures built on a sales database with duplicate transaction records overstate performance. Under SOX, this is a controls failure.
Healthcare record inaccuracies: A patient record with incorrect medication allergies or outdated diagnoses creates patient safety risk and HIPAA compliance exposure.
Data Quality as Compliance Infrastructure
The practices that produce good data quality — systematic profiling, validation at entry, deduplication, retention management — are the same practices that support regulatory compliance. They're not separate programs.
Sohovi helps with the data quality component: profiling your datasets to identify accuracy gaps, completeness failures, and PII in unexpected places — providing the data quality foundation that compliance programs require.
If your compliance program doesn't include a data quality component, it's incomplete.
