What Is Controls Assurance?

At its core, controls assurance is the process of evaluating and verifying the effectiveness of internal controls for your organisation’s risks. It ensures that these controls are adequately designed and operational, effectively modifying risks to achieve desired outcomes. This process not only helps mitigate risk causes and consequences but also provides critical insights for decision-makers.

Controls assurance primarily focuses on:

• Evaluating Control Effectiveness: determining how well a control is reducing or managing the risk it is meant to modify.
• Testing Controls: objectively evaluating design effectiveness and assessing operational effectiveness.
• Undertaking Improvement Actions: to improve the performance and therefore the effectiveness of that control relative to the risk and what is a reasonably achievable level of control.
• Monitoring and Reviewing: establishing ongoing monitoring and periodic reviews to identify control underperformance and opportunities for improvement.

Why Is Controls Assurance Important?

In today’s complex and challenging business environment, having optimally performing controls is a necessity. Controls assurance ensures that organisations can:

• Enhance Risk Mitigation: by identifying underperforming controls and implementing improvement actions, businesses can effectively reduce risk.
• Drive Confidence in Decision-Making: assurance processes provide information on the performance of key controls, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions on effectiveness and further action that may be required.
• Meet Regulatory Requirements: many industries and regulatory authorities require organisations to have effective internal controls that are regularly assessed.
• Continually Improve: on-going monitoring and periodic review to identify control underperformance and opportunities for improvement is an integral part of controls assurance and risk management.

Real-World Benefits Across Industries

Controls assurance serves a variety of purposes across industry sectors, including:

• Local Government: for safeguarding public funds, improving service delivery, and enhancing the overall effectiveness and accountability of the organisation to the community, public and private sectors.
• Financial Services: for enhanced operational risk mitigation, fraud protection, compliance and improved financial reporting. This builds confidence and trust with investors, customers and regulators and adds to the organisation’s competitive advantage.
• Healthcare: contributes to patient safety and data security, ensures compliance with industry regulations, standards and guidelines and contributes to financial performance. This in turn builds trust and enhances the organisation’s public and stakeholder reputation.
• Utilities: contributes to reliability and safety, improved operational efficiency and customer service and enhances regulatory compliance. This builds public confidence in the company’s ability to provide safe, reliable and sustainable services and improves relationships with regulators, investors and the broader business community.

How Riskonnect Supports Effective Controls Assurance

Riskonnect brings a comprehensive, user-friendly suite of tools to support an effective controls assurance framework that can be scaled up from a basic approach to intermediate and advanced levels. Here’s how we can help:

Fig 1.0: Linking and Integration: GSP software enables organisations to link controls directly to risk causes and consequences using bow tie analysis, as well as linking controls to other risks, incidents and compliance obligations.

Fig 1.1: Customisable Workflows: our customisable workflow capability enables an organisation to design its own controls testing and evaluation process, covering operational and design effectiveness.

Fig 1.2: Role-Specific Options: Camms solutions support first, second, and third lines of assurance roles and responsibilities, through options including spot checks and routine tests, control self-assessments, control testing, auditing of control frameworks and assurance reviews.

Fig 1.3: Automated Monitoring and Reporting: Features like system-generated alerts based on trigger events and thresholds, improvement action and KPI update reporting requirements ensure timely responses within the controls assurance framework.

Take the Next Step with Riskonnect

Ready to automate and transform your controls assurance approach? Partner with Riskonnect to build a robust controls assurance framework tailored to your organisation’s unique needs. Explore how our tools can help you achieve operational excellence, mitigate risks, and deliver on your organisational objectives.

For an in-depth exploration of Optimising Risk Management with Controls Assurance, watch our on-demand webinar.

For customised assistance in configuring and optimising this functionality to align with your organisation’s specific requirements, connect with a Virtual Consultant. Our experts can provide tailored guidance, address unique use cases, and ensure seamless integration with your existing systems and workflows.