Control Freak

In your finance area:

1. You feel like you’re spending more than you should on controls and corporate compliance, yet you’re getting less value than you’d like for the money you’re spending.

2. You’re concerned about risk, but have no automated way to identify and monitor your key risk areas.

Within your auditing:

3. You’re spending the majority of your time on compliance-related tasks, rather than focusing on emerging risks and ways you can add value to finance and business managers.

4. You rely primarily on manual auditing and sampling to ensure that corporate controls are effective.

In your IT area:

5. You spend more time than you would like with auditors.

6. Managing who has access to applications is seen as your problem by business users.

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You may know them as CFOs or Controllers. They are the people responsible for the financial health of your organization and corporate compliance. These professionals rely on rules, guidelines, and regulations—for a reason. It’s the same reason “Good fences make good neighbors.” Borders exist to clearly define boundaries and, ideally, the behavior that respects them.

We understand that their goal is to use controls to help protect against the varied risks of financial operations within your organization. From boardrooms to cubicles to loading docks, we need to make a place for the work of control freaks today.

Join the cause; subscribe today.

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Welcome back.

This blog is all about sharing our passion for continuous controls monitoring (CCM).

It’s a term often associated with “control freaks”—and that’s okay. We know it’s a rare breed that can take on the duties of monitoring financial anomalies for the good of an organization or business.

So this is your place. It’s where like-minded control freaks can share best practices and current trends. We’ll discuss corporate compliance, segregation of duties, continuous auditing, and mix in some acronyms like FISMA—the Federal Information Security Management Act.

We’re also here for all those “on the outside” who need to understand and work with Control Freaks. We’ll offer tips and tactics to keep things productive. And just maybe you’ll join our ranks!

Join the cause; subscribe today.

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Did y’all see that the SEC has set up its own special office for the expected influx of whistleblower complaints?  You can check out the website of the new Office of the Whistleblower here, where you’ll find all kinds of info on the ins and outs of how the process works. 

We’d seen the many articles and read a serious amount of analysis, but it didn’t seem so real until the real estate deal. 

Anyway, as we’ve discussed, the whistle-blower provisions of Dodd-Frank are a pretty big deal, and if your business hasn’t thought of how’ll you’ll adapt, well, now’s the time. 

Fortunately for you, we’ve written a good bit on this, so at least you’ve got somewhere to start. The good news? Companies with a firm handle on internal controls can make a great case for employees that concerns should remain internal.

The other good news?  If you don’t have such a great handle on the internal controls thing, we can help with that.

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We’ve posted before about incidences of fraud that just make you cringe for nearly everyone in a story – well, except the perpetrator.  In those cases, if you’re anything like us Control Freaks (hyperaware as we are of what can go wrong at any minute), you just feel bad for the poor guys who didn’t have the good sense to implement controls to prevent against fraud – or have a way of monitoring the controls they do have.

And then there are cases like this one.  Maxim Healthcare, which had at one point nearly two BILLION dollars in federal contracts for its home health aides and nurses, has admitted to $61 million worth of federal fraud and agreed to pay civil and criminal penalties totaling $150 million. 

Not that it’s a great scenario to have one lone greedy employee who’s pilfering without attracting notice.  But it’s an order of magnitude worse when DOJ investigations (spurred by a whistleblower complaint) reveal widespread instances of false billing, across multiple states. 

We talk a lot about the impossibility of legislating ethics, and how all the technology in the world can’t make people behave well.  This is a pretty bright example of just what can go wrong when a business operates without an appropriate respect for the governance and compliance concerns that should have been forefront in the minds of those in charge.  Sheesh.

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