Refocus your internal control lens on management review controls

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Will the upcoming 16-year anniversary of Sarbanes-Oxley be a cause for celebration or a continued reflection of hitches faced along the way? The ball is in your court. You can be better able to improve your internal control over financial reporting (ICFR) program by resolving common challenges to management review controls (MRCs), including high compliance costs, outdated ICFR programs, and a continued focus on ICFR by regulators.

So what should change? It’s time to employ the select pillars—people, data quality, risk identification, documentation, and control design—and modernize your ICFR program through implementation of leading practices, innovation, and technology in an effort to increase the level of precision of the MRCs control performance and enhance the testing approach. Ultimately, these actions may serve to reduce the cost of compliance and increase the reliability of financial reporting.

The second paper in Deloitte’s series on ICFR explores how MRCs can be a success story for the upcoming year if management refocuses the internal control lens on these efforts.