A mandate is an official order or commission to perform a task. Mandates are often buried within sentences, within paragraphs in citations. A simple example of a mandate would be 'turn off the faucet' or 'feed the dog', although you as a member of the Mapping Team are more likely to encounter a mandate like 'Ensure that your organization has an information security program in place' than 'feed the dog'.
As stated above, mandates are actions that an organization must perform. There can be one or multiple mandates in a citation. In the case of multiple mandates, each mandate must be tagged separately. These mandates fall into 3 categories: those that call for documentation about an action, those that call for the performing of the action, and those that call for testing for the action to have taken place.
How do you differentiate between the three? Glad you asked: