We are St. Louis-based consultants specializing in helping organizations to reduce both costs and risk by improving business controls. We have collective experience teaching business controls in 27 countries with students from 65 countries in a variety of industries, have conducted thousands of seminars and workshops, and have provided organizational development and process improvement consulting for hundreds of clients.
(1) The first need is management certification of financial reports. The best line of personal and organizational protection is to create an active defense. That requires a best practices process which makes certain that everything possible is being done to ensure business control is in place.
(2) The second need is to continue lowering organizational costs and improving the bottom line. Shortcomings in business controls result in a failure to:
In today’s environment, improving business controls is the fastest way to lower costs and improve bottom line profit.
BizControl Solutions research has identified six “Out-of-Control Incubators” along with a set of common business "trigger events" that are leading indicators of control problems. These are present in nearly every organization.
BizControl Solutions research shows that a best practices business control function has the following characteristics:
Organization-wide learning takes place both from successes and from problems resolved.
Falling short of these best practices typically results in not obtaining the maximum available savings from the business controls improvement effort and in increasing risks from out-of-control processes.
There is a major disconnect between organizational business control needs and leadership competence in this area. Most managers have not had any comprehensive business controls training. It’s not listed on any organizational value statements, leadership competency models, performance plans, or appraisals. It is not a standard part of decision-making processes or investment analyses. Business controls is a new managerial and supervisory “core competency” for the entire organization.
Financial controls are actually a subset of total controls. Business controls refer to the entire range of control processes and elements, not only within the individual organization but throughout the entire relational enterprise. This goes far beyond the traditional accounting and financial audit functions. Keep in mind, all the organizations that experienced control problems passed their internal and external audits.
As business operations and relationships become more complex, it's nearly impossible to assess an organization from the inside. The finance department exists in one of the organizational silos. In addition, inside auditors look at financial performance in a reactive fashion, and are encumbered by internal politics and their own interdepartmental relationships.
Obtaining these services from external auditors presents a conflict of interest situation. These auditors are influenced by the existing auditing relationship, and are being called upon to review processes that may have already passed previous audits. For this reason, recent legislation limits obtaining certain consulting services from outside auditors.
Finally, these three organizations do not focus on business controls as a research or practice specialty. If they did or could, best practices would already be in place.
Assistance with this effort should be provided by an external organization specializing in business controls. Advantages of this approach are:
This provides a comprehensive, leading edge, independent, and effective solution for the organization.
BizControl Solutions
St. Louis, Missouri
636.537.1100
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