The Reliant Eye
March 2009 Edition
Welcome to The Reliant Eye, providing audit professionals with news, features and trends on the business issues and technologies that affect you most.
ReliantAuditor Continuously Monitors Key Business Systems
You have to audit your business processes no matter the platform they run on, so Reliant provides application and database integration for any of your critical business systems. Using ReliantAuditor, organizations can continuously monitor automated controls within SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains) and other ERP systems, for better efficiency, insight and assurance.
Reliant also provides out-of-the-box controls for many of these environments to enable rapid implementation and accelerate time to value. For example, Reliant has automated controls for Microsoft Dynamics GP to address such risk scenarios as Duplicate Payments, Duplicate Journal Entries, Manual Journal Entries Over a Threshold and Checks Issued Over a Threshold. These financial controls can be configured to meet your specific business policies, and any transactions that fail to meet the control criteria will be flagged for further control testing and remediation.
In addition to financial controls, Reliant offer a wide variety of pre-built controls for SOX, IT, operational and strategic audits, including controls for Inventory, Configuration Management, Segregation of Duties, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and many others. To find out more about our control library or continuous monitoring and auditing with ReliantAuditor, contact Reliant here.
PCAOB to Auditor - Focus on the CFO
A new guidance by the audit oversight board shows how finance chiefs can either buttress or make a hash out of a small company's internal controls. A sharp and experienced CFO with broad knowledge of a small company's operation can make for a much easier and cheaper audit of the company's internal controls over financial reporting. An unruly finance chief, however, can wreak havoc on the controls of a tiny firm.
Internal Audit Automation Set for Takeoff?
CFO recently published a feature story on Reliant Solutions and how we are pointing to the future of audit technology and providing a boost to the internal audit profession. Hariot Prentice, director of standards and guidance for the Institute of Internal Auditors was quoted in the article, "Most of the [GRC software] products are not ones that you can just plug in and they suddenly run. If this new package is something that's quite intuitive and doesn't take a lot of end-user knowledge to get the thing working, it will have a huge advantage."
IDC Insight: Internal Audit Provides Continuous Assurance with Reliant
IDC, the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology market last year publish a comprehensive report on Reliant. On the importance of automating the audit process IDC writes, "Effective audit analytics and continuous monitoring not only help identify audit areas that present higher risks but can support an auditor's assertions of lower risk, which can support reduced internal control assessments and lower audit fees."
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Challenges in Strategic Audit and the Audit Process
Internal Audit staff, managers and executives are invited to answer this short survey on issues affecting your ability to conduct Strategic Audits, and challenges you face within the audit process. Individual responses will be kept completely anonymous, with results compiled and reported in our next newsletter. The survey is short, will only take a few minutes to complete, and if you're one of the first 100 to respond, you will receive an executive portfolio courtesy of Reliant!
How the Current Economy Offers IA New Opportunities
Oversight… Governance… Heightened regulatory scrutiny... Reduced budgets... Recession... Welcome to the vocabulary of business in 2009. While there's no doubt these are challenging times, the current economic climate actually presents a fantastic new opportunity for Internal Audit. Those who recognize the opportunity and take steps to elevate their focus and skills are the ones who will provide a more strategic and valuable role to their organizations in the coming years.As we hear in our daily conversations and read in industry reports and news, the role of Internal Audit continues to evolve as organizations look to extract more value from every area of their business while optimizing processes, reducing costs and improving productivity. But there's a tension at work; with increased opportunity for audit to play a strategic role in an organization, there are few people with the skills required to take advantage of this shift. According to a recent E&Y survey1 of Internal Audit executives, only 17 percent of respondents rated their current team's skill at enterprise risk assessment as "very competent," just 19 percent said the same for fraud detection, 22 percent for use of technology and analytics and 39 percent for business process improvement.
Yet, according to Dominique Vincenti, the IIA's chief advocacy officer, these skills "should be absolutely fundamental and core to any internal auditor who is trying to take his job seriously."
Given the financial turbulence on Wall Street and across the globe, effective Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is increasingly critical to the survival of most businesses, yet the E&Y survey indicates that more than half of all respondents have "little or no involvement" in ERM. While some may say that IA's role should be limited to risk assessment, not risk management, surprisingly almost a third of those surveyed said their companies are not performing any enterprise-wide risk assessment at all!
I believe this is where true leaders and strategic thinkers in Internal Audit will be able to differentiate themselves. For many of you - as your 60, 70 and 80 hour work weeks will attest - your jobs feel like a circus act trying to keep the plates spinning on poles. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are solutions available to automate what is taking a disproportionate amount of your time - SOX compliance, control testing and remediation, and other tactical audit operations - so you can focus on the strategic risks affecting your organization. But this will require a new way of looking at audit and eliminating the time-intensive, manual routines that no longer deliver optimal results to the organization, nor enhance your career.
This is the challenge and the opportunity that faces you and that drives Reliant to develop new solutions to help you capitalize on it. I'd love to hear your thought on this, too. Feel free to drop me an email at dipak.shah@reliantaudit.com with any comments or questions.
Warm regards,
Dipak
- "Escalating the Role of Internal Audit" Ernst & Young's 2008 Global Internal Audit Survey
