English Bus/Financial Management Internal controls/audits

X: I think one of the challenges that comes out of that also, where I’ve seen a little bit of disappointment, is that looking at internal control systems, particularly if they’re related to finance, often the risk of fraud comes up as a major risk Yes, it is a risk, but is it in the top 10 risks of an organisation? I doubt it. But it has a very high visibility at board level, at audit committee level, and so it often gets too much attention compared with the other key risks. And all organisations have frauds, I’m sure none of us particularly want to talk about the frauds we have in our own organisation, but it’s a fact of life that there are very clever people in organisations who can find ways of getting round the controls that are in place and putting money in their pocket. In many cases those tend to be fairly small amounts. Occasionally I guess there are some really big ones, but the resources that go into thinking about fraud controls and the management of fraud seem to me to be really out of perspective with the importance of fraud in an organisation.

Y: As an American company like Z, where we have to of course accord with all the SOX controls, I agree with you, and that is where I see … not the danger, but that the ****EKS**** basically more or less follows the SOX controls, and that is basically the financial controls. As you said, they are mainly focusing of course on frauds: manipulating balance sheets, income statements and so on. For example, I am responsible for two captives, and then at Z we have a special group who, with the responsible managers, define what kind of SOX controls we have to perform, but it’s mainly related, as I said, to avoid fraud, to avoid unauthorised payments. But, you know, it’s hardly any risk. For example, a couple of years ago we did a big enterprise risk project and at that time it came out in interviews with senior managers that one of the biggest risks they considered was a strike in the US. A strike could have a big impact, and no-one was thinking of this.

I am unable to find what does EKS stands for.

Thanks in advance