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Internal control, as defined by accounting and auditing, is a process for assuring of an organization's objectives in operational effectiveness and efficiency, reliable financial reporting, and compliance with laws, regulations and policies. A broad concept, internal control involves everything that controls risks to an organization.
The auditor must test entity-level controls that are important to the auditor's conclusion about whether the company has effective internal control over financial reporting. Depending on the auditor's evaluation of the effectiveness of the entity-level controls, the auditor can increase or decrease the amount of testing that they will perform.
An example of an entity-level control objective is: "Employees are aware of the Company's Code of Conduct." The COSO 1992–1994 Framework defines each of the five components of internal control (i.e., Control Environment, Risk Assessment, Information & Communication, Monitoring, and Control Activities).
The accounting profession has invested significantly in separation of duties because of the understood risks accumulated over hundreds of years of accounting practice. By contrast, many corporations in the United States found that an unexpectedly high proportion of their Sarbanes-Oxley internal control issues came from IT.
In 1992, COSO published "Internal Control – Integrated Framework" [2] which detailed five key components of an effective internal control system, along with tools to evaluate the effectiveness of such a system. In 2013, COSO re-released the Integrated Framework, stating that significant changes in technology and global business trends ...
Internal auditing is an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization's operations. It helps an organization accomplish its objectives by bringing a systematic, disciplined approach to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of risk management, control and governance processes. [1]
A number of software packages are available to support the control self-assessment process. These are typically modified versions of software developed originally for internal use by audit and accountancy firms such as Deloitte or by niche vendors specialising in business or financial management tools.
Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the process of recording and processing information about economic entities, such as businesses and corporations. [1] [2] Accounting measures the results of an organization's economic activities and conveys this information to a variety of stakeholders, including investors, creditors, management, and regulators. [3]