Remaining in compliance with growing requirements from new laws, regulations, standards, or contracts demands increasing IT support beyond simple reporting tools or archiving solutions. However, an efficient IT support of compliance management requires a more general approach. In this contribution, a framework for automating compliance is introduced. Policies are seen as the key to aligning non-technical compliance requirements to a technical IT system. The policy language ExPDT is presented and evaluated with regard to maintaining flexibility of business processes and validating compliance.