Control Assessment Services.

Virtually all modern organizations have some level of controls associated with the conduct of their business. In the aftermath of the Enron, World Com and related business debacles, management teams have begun to pay significantly greater attention to the operational, financial and reporting controls necessary to assure the integrity, accuracy and validity of the information they report to their various constituencies. The implementation of Sarbanes Oxley and related regulatory activities have illustrated the confluence of changes affecting the way the investment business operates, what and how it reports and whether those results can be trusted.

The new regulatory initiatives have propagated corresponding changes in business, operational and reporting processes. ICC's experience suggests that many organizations have been unprepared for the level and velocity of changes and the enormous amount of time and resources that are necessary to integrate them within their operating and technology environments. As investment staffs strain to meet the new challenges and compliance requirements it becomes increasingly easy to overlook or omit the apparatus necessary to assure that the organization maintains appropriate levels of control over its businesses. ICC has encountered these circumstances on numerous occasions and has addressed this need through its control assessment advisory services.

ICCs Control Assessment Services consist of the following activities:

• Operating, policy and procedural reviews
• Business process and functional analyses
• Workflow analyses
• Infrastructure and systems evaluations
• Operational gap analyses
• Process and efficiency reviews

Client Benefits

• Provides early identification of control gaps through access, omission or modification of existing business processes
• Affords timely, accurate documentation that reflects the "real" world as it exists within a operating production environment
• Detects policy and procedural gaps necessary to assure accuracy and authenticity of data and information initiated, generated, transmitted, housed and maintained for the firm's various constituencies.
• Identifies the organization's overall control environment and the recommended steps necessary to improve prospective gaps, omissions or oversights in which management was unaware or uninformed.
• Creates a mechanism to report the organization's state of control and readiness to protect its intellectual assets.
• Provides support documentation of remediation efforts throughout the affected organizational units.
• Serves as a managerial tool to close gaps and strengthen the organization's ability to address audit, compliance and prospective legal liabilities associated with reporting and control vulnerabilities.