Internal control

Yeah, and I'm glad you highlighted that.

And, and on that note of risk, I'd love for you to chat about internal controls for just a minute, which is a, a term that anyone's in accounting really gets.

But a lot of small business owners, and, and again, five to 25 million is still a small business owner, internal controls is usually limited to like every once in a while look at the credit card, right, to make sure that it's in there.

When you're going through, how do you help establish that? What are some best practices that firms of that range or really any size can do? Again, internal controls, just for everybody who doesn't know, like that means that there's processes in place to make sure that like people aren't stealing money from the company or misappropriating money or even just making poor purchasing decisions.

It doesn't even have to be malicious, just like how many subscriptions has your team signed up for that nobody knows about, nobody's using, but there's not anyone there to, to check on that.

Yeah, and who, who has access to your bank account and who, who can do wires and what are the, the processes around sending wires and so on, which we-- I mean, we all see, particularly in the wealth management, the, the attempts of fraud of external people, sometimes internal as well.

Have, uh, dual authentication, so that's, so that it's, uh, not all landing on one, and being able to, to regularly review the books and the financials to, to, to catch any sort of weird things that are happening.

So there's a lot more to it, but, but, um, a lot of it is on the, yeah, on, on the, uh, the banking side, I would say.

As always, we'll cover legislative and other developments 'cause those are important, including things we have our eyes on in the future.

And then we'll wrap up with reminders about internal control over financial reporting and work through different reminders on that as we think about review controls, evidence, et cetera, for the year.

So with that said, I will now pass this over to Chris DiPetrillo to start our FASB update.

Chris?

And then also consistent with the other, we mentioned an intent to implement side-by-side agreement introduced, uh, under the BEPS framework there in January twenty twenty-six.

Once again, can't remind you enough, things we have our eyes on, not enacted, but things we wanna pay special close attention to.

So with that, I wanna hand it over to Chris, who will now talk about our, uh, reminders over internal controls.

controls.All right.

Secondly, the supplier might not change the document on their end and you could end up getting a collection call from them later on.

Your auditors may think that you made a mistake or that you have some weak internal controls.

You don't want that.

Your auditors might also think it was fraud.

I think there's an expectation gap, as we call it in the profession, between what we deliver and what people think we do, which is especially around fraud and corruption.

I think the idea is that we're going out there trying to catch people and provide information on fraud and corruption, when what we're really trying to do is we're trying to improve the outcomes and the internal controls so it does prevent those things.

but we're not out there trying to catch people and catch them in the act of creating and undertaking fraudulent activities.

So I think that's one of the areas.

But ultimately, yeah, just more dialogue about what we're doing so we can explain it a little bit more and make it more accessible for people.

And in regards to government agencies in particular, government ministries and departments, What can they do before an audit takes place to strengthen their financial management, record-keeping, procurement practices, and overall accountability?

So there's actually a responsibility on them under Section 14 of the Public Financial Management Act to say that they're the ones responsible for their internal controls.

Now, one of the problems that you get in many governments' environments is government doesn't see itself or the government officials don't see themselves responsible for the internal controls.

and not the kind you want.

In this video, we'll investigate 10 of the most overlooked accounts payable best practices, the ones that quietly impact accuracy, internal controls, and costs.

These are the fundamentals that strong accounts payable departments get right.

and they're pulled straight out of my book, 131 Best Practices for Accounts Payable.

Let's start with the one that is increasingly causing headaches, even at large companies.

Overlook best practice number one.

Incorporate all necessary internal controls into your accounts payable process when you automate.

Automation isn't a substitution for controls.

Get them, Zach.

So yeah, so it is a busy week.

We've got AGA's Internal Controls and Fraud Conference Tuesday and Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan building downtown.

I'll be there with bells on.

So if you're there, come say hi.

Yeah.

So you're talking about implementing internal controls at a micro level down to the specific employee.

Right.

You can you can you can make that a very high level overarching document that says these specific roles are the only people who could execute X, Y and Z to simplify that much more.

But because the case is connected to efforts to recover 1MDB funds, questions about banks' due diligence and transaction monitoring are likely to arise.

So, Weibun, is it fair at this stage to ask whether DBS's internal controls failed, or would that be jumping the gun?

We think there's a jumping the gun.

But of course, we will have to wait for more details to surface.