The first blind spot is role sprawl. Teams often add requesters and approvers quickly, but few organizations perform quarterly access reviews. Over time, approval chains no longer match delegated authority, which increases risk for off-policy and unbudgeted purchases.
The second blind spot is category drift. Items that start as legitimate one-off purchases can become repeat spend in categories that should be sourced through contracted suppliers. Without monthly category monitoring, decentralized buying bypasses negotiated controls.
The third blind spot is poor exception logging. If policy exceptions are handled informally through email or chat, procurement and compliance teams cannot quantify how often controls are bypassed, by whom, and for what reason.
A practical control set includes quarterly access recertification, category exception thresholds, and a centralized exception log tied to remediation ownership.