Compliance cost doesn't only come from regulation or audit. Sometimes the project creates it.
When basic sanity checks are missed, the same mistakes repeat, or decisions are not backed by evidence, scrutiny goes up. More reviews and approvals, more documentation. Senior people get pulled into details they should not need to manage.
Delivery slows down because people stop taking the work at face value. Everything needs another check.
In EPM and finance transformation work, this is where it bites. A script affects more data than intended. A rule runs beyond its expected scope. A backup is missed before a major change. A report does not reconcile cleanly to source. On their own, each may look like a one-off. Repeated, the question changes from "how do we fix this?" to "can this project move without closer supervision?"
Closer supervision is expensive. Every change gets slower and every decision gets second-guessed. The people who should be building the solution spend more time explaining and defending it.
Reliable teams avoid this by building discipline into the work. They test properly, document the decisions that matter, think through the impact before making changes, protect data, keep ownership clear, and catch the obvious things first. It sounds basic, but basic discipline is often what keeps projects from becoming expensive to supervise.
Once confidence drops, the cost is not just the rework. It is the extra supervision every future decision starts to need.