Metaphorically, your management is asking you to drive nails with a screwdriver. The right tool for the job here is facter, not puppet. (And puppet already uses facter, so your management apparently doesn't understand the stack here.) While this is ultimately their problem, it sounds like you have to act as an enabler in order to keep your job and buy your groceries. Anyway, on to the helpful stuff!
I have no idea what sort of thing is in this compliance report. I will assume that it is checking which hosts have successfully completed a puppet agent run. To deliberately fail this in your scenario I might:
-write a script which checks the value of PermitRootLogin
-script should exit with a non-zero status if the value is undesired
-package this script in a deb (or rpm on your platform)
-use puppet to distribute my deb everywhere
-use an exec to run the script
Then you will see the same style of failure as if you ran this:
$ puppet apply -e 'exec { "/bin/false": }'
err: /Stage[main]//Exec[/bin/false]/returns: change from notrun to 0 failed: /bin/false returned 1 instead of one of [0] at line 1
notice: Finished catalog run in 0.08 seconds
And that means the host is non-compliant.
Another item on my original point: ensure your communications with management on this matter are all documented via email. When they finally figure out how much technical debt they are accruing you will not wish to be left holding their bag.
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