This topic is one that I've seen diverse organizations deal with in different ways, some group are 'better' at it than others. The need to periodically review procedures has not been (in my experience) specifically called out in 'regulations' (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some have done this explicitly) but it commonly comes up as the most obvious solution to address other elements of regulations. For example, it used to be the case (I no longer have any direct experience) that in order to maintain A2LA lab accreditation labs would commonly have to demonstrate that they are periodically reviewing their internal procedures. In many fields 'periodic review' is the implemented manner by which organizations 'maintain' (appropriate) procedures.
For certain institutions which PUBLISH standards, it is often the case that the periodic review of a recognized (and still useful) standard requires no revision, so the 'revision' (typically year of release) remains the same but the published standard will identify date of original approval along with any dates of recent 're-approval' (planned and scheduled by a specific committee). ASTM used to do this, I haven't reviewed ASTM standards/test methods in a while. Most manufacturing organizations don't do this... quite frankly there would be too much overhead involved (including all sorts of procedural requirements) for almost everyone, and without the weight of a major organization with diverse stakeholders 3rd party auditors would almost certainly have a field day.
Some organizations take the simplest approach to simply 'casually approve the next revision'. This is typically always a waste of resources, but there are some pretty simple-minded 3rd-party auditors and pretty simple-minded quality managers out there that don't want to implement (or cannot guarantee) a more comprehensive system to address this.
I have seen all the variations of this: the auditor that lacks critical thinking skills, the pendantic auditor, the malicious auditor who is toying with a naive quality manager, the quality manager who lacks critical thinking, the frustrated quality manager who can't get people to follow the implemented process... I can sense @Jim Wynne 's temperature rising.
I prefer the approach that has someone (typically a 'quality' role) keeping track of periodic review status, and a document control system that allows for the recording of periodic review results to be archived alongside the (released) document under (periodic) review. This can be slightly tricky to implement because there is both a monitoring/scheduling element (the human factor, someone has to have this job) and a need to be able to routinely archive supporting data alongside documents that have already entered the 'released' phase of their life cycle.
