COSO’s effort to update its famed, but 20-year-old, framework for managing internal controls has sparked a deeper debate this spring about how companies should approach internal control overall, and whether significant changes are in order. What the final answers might be remains anyone’s guess.
COSO published a draft of the update to its 1992 Internal Control – Integrated Framework at the end of last year. It asked companies and others to comment how the revised version might work in practice. Since then, several opinions have emerged either supporting the update’s incremental approach to change, or voicing strong criticism that the update doesn’t go far enough to reflect current thinking on internal controls.
