Any creative solutions to capturing submitter sign-off prior to closing a ticket?

[Swankeeper]

This has got to be a fairly universal challenge, and I'm curious how others have handled it.  I work in a regulated industry, and we had a recent audit finding of "you lack objective evidence that a submitter has signed off on your resolution before resolving an incident."  Similar finding (which makes less sense to me) of lack of evidence before closing a service request.  Basically auditors scolding certain support teams for premature closure of tickets.

My client is always ready to bolt more fields onto INCs (!), which makes me twitch ("throw a couple of choicelist fields on the backend record so the resolvers can attest that they got sign-off on this ticket").

The simple expedient of a "grace period" between Resolved and Closed is apparently insufficient.

[Sebastian Tisc1]

So you let agents close the ticket without either a) the customer accepting the solution via portal or mail or b) the auto-close kicking in?

If the customer HAS to accept the solution, you should adjust your auto-close flow to either not run at all or only for records that do not fall under your audit regulations. Same goes for the ability to close the task as a fulfiller.
Of course, there can still be situations where the customer confirms on the phone or in person that everything is fine now. If its such a big audit issue that the agent cannot simply add a note in this situation and close the record, you would have to send the customer to the portal to accept the solution themselves.

There arent really many elegant ways around audit requirements.