…InTouch

The latest risk management, resilience, audit, governance and compliance news from InConsult.

 

 

December 2011

Risk Management

Understanding Internal Controls: Internal controls feature prominently on an organisation’s risk register, yet one of the major weaknesses of AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009 Risk management – Principles and guidelines is the lack of guidance around internal controls and in particular, the different types of controls and how they work to mitigate risks. InConsult take a close look at the role of internal controls, the various types and their limitations.

Source: inconsult.com.au

What to Put on Your Risk Radar Screen: IT security, global expansion, and excess cash top the list of 10 risks companies should be particularly concerned about in 2012, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB).

Source: cfo.com

Damage Control: Do you know what the reputation of your organisation is? Where are its reputation risks? How do you manages those? How you would manage a reputational crisis?

Source: reputationreport.com.au

Country Risk -- What You're Overlooking: Natural disasters, political uprisings, trade policy changes and economic crises can have devastating impacts on supply chain operations. Why? Because it is difficult to say where and when they will strike next. 

Source: industryweek.com

5 Ways to Address New Challenges in Risk Management: Confronted with the recent financial crisis and emerging regulations of the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, companies are facing a thickening regulatory web that is increasing the risks and costs associated with compliance.

Source: businessfinancemag.com

Risk and HR Managers: No Talking!: With risk management having bloomed, for many companies, into an essential competency over the past decade, it only makes sense that enterprise risk managers would eventually begin spooning human-capital risk onto their plates. And that is happening — but very slowly, with relatively few yet digging in.

Source: cfo.com

Risk Management in Practice

Risk Management Meltdowns: A Look at Some Real-World Examples:  Risk management should be a top priority when working on complex or untried projects. Why, you ask? Necessity is the mother of invention and in risk management, often inventions, ideas and projects go awry when the forethought and the what ifs aren’t asked, explored and properly managed.

Source: Brighthub.com

Governance & Compliance

Corporate Governance Matters: Lessons for Practitioners: Our purpose is to examine the choices that organizations can make in designing governance systems and the impact those choices have on executive decision-making and the organization’s performance.

Source: business-ethics.com

Consultation Paper - Review of Not-for-profit Governance Arrangements: The Assistant Treasurer, has released a consultation paper on current governance arrangements for the not-for-profit (NFP) sector. The outcomes of the governance review will help form the governance requirements for registered entities in the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission legislation, starting from 1 July 2012.

Source: business-ethics.com

Compliance and Ethics in Risk Management:  Today I would like to address two related topics that are growing in importance: the heightened role of ethics in an effective regulatory compliance program, and the role of both ethics and compliance in enterprise risk management.

Source: harvard.edu

Financial Services

27 North American Insurance Chief Risk Officers Form Council: Chief risk officers (CROs) from some of the largest life and P&C insurers in North America are the first to join a new association formed to develop and promote leading practices in risk management throughout the insurance industry.

Source: insurancenetworking.com

The role of internal audit in financial services firm: Opening remarks by Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, to the Institute of Internal Auditors Financial Services Forum, Sydney.

Source: bis.org

Basel III: Impacts of the reform on banks’ internal control activities: The Basel III reform comes into force in 2013 with a gradual implementation of new standards that should spread out until the end of 2019.

Source: sia-partners.com

Occ Health, Safety & Environment

Bayswater death causes outcry over work safety laws:  The death of 37-year-old worker at a stone masonry company in Bayswater yesterday has sparked renewed calls for the state government to strengthen workplace safety laws.

Source: smh.com.au

The new OHS regime shock:  Some businesses in Victoria or Western Australia who are breathing a sigh of relief that they have a further 12 months to get their systems into order for the new Work Health and Safety laws may in fact be covered by those laws in relation to some of their work from January 1, 2012.

Source: smartcompany.com.au

Bullying costing business up to $36b per annum:  The tragic suicide of a man, whose death was linked to extreme workplace bullying, has resulted in changes to the law classifying bullying as a criminal offense in Victoria, with prison terms of up to 10 years. These legislative changes also have wide-ranging implications for business owners.

Source: dynamicbusiness.com.au

Financial Management

An Accident Waiting to Happen:  How many times have you heard of something — or someone — being an "accident waiting to happen"? This common idiom is applied to individuals, collective activities like industrial manufacturing, and even specific locations like traffic intersections.

Source: cfo.com

The Olympus Fraud Scandal

Analysis: Olympus scandal puts auditors under scrutiny:  The Japanese maker of cameras and medical equipment shocked investors on Tuesday, admitting it had used payments to merger advisors and venture capital funds to cover up securities losses dating back decades.

Source: reuters.com

A history of audit failures:  The admission by Olympus Corp that it falsified financial reports for more than a decade should not shock anyone. The shock is that, for years, auditors failed to detect such massive fraud.

Source: reuters.com

Serious Fraud Office to launch inquiry into Olympus scandal:  The Serious Fraud Office has become the latest regulator to launch an investigation into Olympus as it emerged that the scandal-hit camera and endoscope maker has vowed to take legal action against any executives involved in the corporate cover up.

Source: independent.co.uk

The Shame File

Public servant sought over $16m fraud:  A public servant has allegedly ripped off Queensland Health for $16 million. He is on the run after it was discovered he had been transferring millions of dollars into private accounts. The 36-year-old was the manager of the finance division of the Community Services Branch at Queensland Health.

Source: 7news

Can we help?            

If you have any risk management, governance, internal audit or business continuity matters you would like to discuss, contact InConsult on 02 9241 1344 or email your query to info@inconsult.com.au

Season’s  Greetings

Wishing all our clients, friends and readers a Happy Christmas, safe holidays and a prosperous 2012.

Welcome!

We recently welcomed a number of new clients to InConsult:

§  Aged Community Services Association

§  Armidale Dumaresq Council

§  Calliden Group

§  Guyra Shire Council

§  Hurstville Council

§  Mobile Embrace

§  New England Weed Authority

Risk Management Technology

GuardianERM.net releases latest version – v.6.1! Highlights include:

§ A number of enhancements to Risk Profiler and Extended Heat Map

§  New Attestation function

§  Configurable Residual Risk rounding

§  Incident management module enhancements

§  New Breach Form

§  New Issues Log

§  A number of new reports and enhancements have been made to the Incident Management Function.

GuardianERM.net is a web-based Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) system that allows people across an organisation to better collaborate, streamline processes and integrate risk, control, audit and incident data to manage risk and improve resilience. It supports best practice standards including AS/NZS ISO 31000, AS 8000, AS 3806, HB 292, ISO 9000.   If you would like to find out how guardian can help you better sustain your risk management framework, click here or contact InConsult to arrange a demonstration or trial.

Upcoming Training

16 February 2012

GIPA in Practice (half-day) The Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (GIPA) has come into effect. The new Act will have a significant impact on the way in which NSW Government agencies provide public access to government information…more

5 March  2012

Introductory Risk Management (one-day) This down-to-earth and ‘entertaining’ training program helps to ensure that all people involved in risk management activities in your organisation understand the key concepts of risk management (using ISO 31000), internal control and audit.  This full day course includes an 8 chapter Introductory Risk Management workbook, case studies, a certificate of attainment and 6 hours CPE points can be claimed…more

Fraud Risk

Beware of staff fraud: KPMG Forensic:  Some Australian companies overlook internal security and rogue employees are getting away with millions of dollars.

Source: computerworld.com.au

Most Corporate Fraud Is an Inside Job Fraud cost organizations 2.1 percent of earnings in the past 12 months, which is equivalent to a week of revenues over the course of a year.

Source: cfoworld.com.au

How to Protect Yourself from Fraud and Identity Theft Offline:  Shred Sensitive Documents Before Disposal: This is probably the easiest and best thing you can do to make sure your bank statements or credit card statements don't wind up in the hands of anyone unintended..

Source: lifehacker.com

Ex-Countrywide Exec Blows The Lid Off The Systemic Fraud At The Company:

A former senior executive at Countrywide Financial, told 60 Minutes that mortgage fraud was a way of business.    "From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was — it appeared systemic. It, it wasn't just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals,"

Source: businessinsider.com

Ten early warning signs of fraud in organizations: Fraud is an increasing enterprise risk but many organizations don't notice the early warning signs that a problem exists. A new checklist provides some help...

Source: continuitycentral.com

Fraud Management Health Check

No organisation can assume that its safeguards against fraud are adequate…you need to know the gaps. Our Fraud Management Health Check is a structured, independent review of your fraud management framework to help provide you peace of mind. If you would like to find out more click here

Business Continuity and Resilience

Future trends in ICT: Gartner has released a list of predictions outlining the changes we can expect to see in ICT over the next few years.

Source: continuitycentral.com

Many business continuity and disaster recovery strategies are out of date: survey: Many UK businesses are still ill-prepared to deal with downtime and unexpected disruption to operations.

Source: continuitycentral.com

How to Handle a Corporate Crisis: A new management role often proves tricky. But things get tense when a big corporate crisis soon erupts.

Source: wsj.com

Is Business Continuity Management a Misnomer?: For more than ten years business continuity management (BCM) has been on the priority list of senior managers because of events such as Y2K, the implementation of the Euro, terrorist attacks, natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, and pandemic outbreaks such as SARS, H1N1 and Mexican Flu.

Source: continuitycentral.com

Internal Audit

The next generation: Internal auditors are in a unique position to become the canary in the mineshaft of corporate culture.

Source: auditandrisk.org.uk

An Eminent Governance Authority Speaks Out on the Role of Internal Audit: The greatest risk to any organization is the behaviour of the executives and believes internal audit should be alert to this risk; monitor it; and be ready, willing, and able to let the audit committee know as soon as it becomes of concern.

Source: theiia.org

Internal auditors to the rescue: From the very start of 2011, the almost Biblical succession of snow, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, revolution in the Middle East, phone hacking, the sovereign debt crisis and rioting across the UK, brought into even sharper focus the myriad of different forms risk can take.

Source: accountancyage.com

Government

Public inquiry:  The ICAC’s latest report on corruption risks in NSW Government procurement. A key reason procurement remains vulnerable to corruption is that the corruption controls of agencies often do not extend beyond written documents and associated training. ICAC found that public sector managers are not using the many other tools, apart from policies and training, that are available to change and influence staff behaviour in a way that enhances corruption control.

Source: icac.nsw.gov.au

 

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