The re-issued document
Many authorities publish an amended regulation as a complete new document rather than as a list of amendments. Anyone who has to comply with it now has to find the amendments themselves, usually by reading the whole thing next to the old one.
For a short circular that is an afternoon. For a consolidated regulation of a hundred pages, re-issued several times a year, it is a standing cost, and the risk is always the same: a reader who knows the old text well skims the new one and misses the sentence that changed.
Comparison as the first step
Upload the previous version and the new one. The change list is the amendment list: each changed provision with its page number in both versions and the old and new text. Sections that moved are reported as moves rather than as a deletion and an insertion, and repeated headers, footers and page numbers are excluded.
One thing to expect: when a new section is inserted and everything after it is renumbered, the changed section numbers appear in the change list. They are real changes to the text, and they are quick to scan past once you have spotted the insertion that caused them.
A worked example
Say a regulator re-issues a reporting circular. The covering note says the reporting template has been updated. The comparison shows the template change, and also that the filing deadline moved from 30 days after quarter end to 21 days, and that a definition of "reportable transaction" gained an extra category.
The deadline change is a date in a paragraph on page 4. The definition change is one line on page 2, but it widens every obligation that uses the term. Neither was in the covering note. Both are exactly what a compliance team is paid to catch, and both are in the change list with page references the team can quote in an internal alert.
Turning the change list into an alert
A compliance alert usually needs three things for each amendment: where it is, what the old text said and what the new text says. The change list already holds all three. A practical approach is to work down the list, discard the renumbering and editorial changes, and write one line of impact against each remaining entry. For a typical re-issue that leaves a handful of items, each with a page reference that a reader can check against the source.
Keep the redlined PDF with the alert. When a business unit asks next year why a procedure changed, the record shows exactly which sentence of which version caused it. If several people review the same re-issue, they all work from the same list, so nobody's reading of the document depends on which pages they happened to look at closely.
Who uses this
- Compliance teams tracking regulatory change across many issuing bodies.
- Law firms producing client alerts on what changed.
- Government departments checking that a re-issued document contains only the approved amendments before publication.
- Bid teams reading tender document corrigenda; see the guide to tender corrigendum comparison.
Before publication
The issuing side has the same problem from the other direction. A consolidated document is edited by several people, and the version that goes out should contain the approved amendments and nothing else. Comparing the draft for publication against the current published version, and checking the change list against the approved amendment list, catches a stray edit before it becomes law or guidance that someone has to comply with.
Publishing the change list alongside the new version also saves every reader from producing their own.
Practical points
Always compare against the immediately previous version, not the original, or older amendments will mix with new ones. Use the digitally generated PDF where one exists; a scan without a text layer is refused, and an OCR'd scan works but brings some recognition noise. Gazette-style two-column layouts are read in the right order.
The engine is rules-based and deterministic: the same two documents always give the same change list. That matters when the output is cited in an alert or attached to a file, because anyone can rerun it and get the same answer.
Long consolidated documents may exceed the 30-page limit for anonymous use. A free account allows up to 100 pages, and the API handles up to 300 pages per document, more on a private deployment.
At scale
The API lets a regulatory-change service compare every newly published version against the last one automatically and store the change list. The engine was first used this way for FDA drug label surveillance; the FDA label article describes that work. Public sector deployments can run entirely inside government infrastructure with no outbound traffic; the government industry page has details.
Try it on your own documents. Upload two versions on the homepage. Documents up to 30 pages need no account, and nothing is stored.
Industry page: PDF comparison for government and regulatory documents