How would you interpret conflicting paper records and instrument audit-trail timestamps?

Why

An audit trail is a secure, computer-generated, time-stamped record that lets you reconstruct who created, changed or deleted data and when. A paper entry is written by a person. When they disagree, there are innocent and serious explanations, and the job is to tell them apart with evidence.

Innocent causes include an instrument clock that drifted or was never set to daylight saving time, a server in another time zone, or an operator who wrote the time the step started while the system logged when the file was saved. Serious causes include data recorded on scrap paper and transcribed later, a run repeated and only the passing result reported, or a backdated entry. The MHRA expects synchronized clocks at the point of use and a known time zone for multi-site data, so the first check is the system's time configuration and any clock-change history.

Then line up every source: the batch record, the instrument audit trail, the network or server log, the access card log and the sample login time. If an HPLC audit trail shows two injections of a sample but the notebook reports one, the gap is not a clock problem. The conclusion should state what the evidence supports, its uncertainty, and whether product decisions relied on the affected data.

The analysis stops where the evidence stops, and an unexplained gap should be recorded as unexplained rather than closed with a guess.