IT General Controls Risk Assessment Report
Foods Fantastic Company
Siqi Li
Oct 29TH 2013
Foods Fantastic Company is a public company which mainly operating regional grocery store in Maryland. This Company relies on application programs, such as bar-code scanner, to entre sales to the system. The FFC majority depends on the computer system to run their business. Based on this situation, the Information General Controls review is necessary for this company as the reason that ITGC is the foundation of every categories of the internal control. To review the ITGC will help the audit committee to determine the risk assessment of the internal controls in the company’s information system. The ITGC mainly classified by five areas, such as
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For the IT Management area, I put a low level of risk assessment. For the information technology management, the company has a specific IT strategic plan, which is consistent with the Company’s strategic plan. In addition, based on the company’s organization cart, I found out the company have a clear reporting and response system. The responsibility for chief information officer clearly classified to four parts, application, operation, information security and database administration. Above all the key aspects we take a review about IT management, the company have a good internal controls for it. There is unlikely happen a risk in this area.
For the System Development, I define it as a medium level of risk assessment. The company did design, develop and implement new systems for a certain time or logical reason. However, the new system testing is not as well as we think. As the result, the new system does no perform well as we expected. Even though the company have involve the internal audit department for the new system development, and the set them as part of the new project team to review the new project, which the team members are all been voting. They have a good process of development of new systems, but the new systems do not perform well. It will still result in a small probability of risk assessment. In general, I set a medium level of risk assessment to let the company consider about this issue. For the Data Security area, I define it as a
First of all, in the area of IT Management, the risk assessment is medium. They have a strategic plan, which is a strength, because a strategic plan will help FFC to meet its business goals by outlining the objectives and strategies for the information system group. In addition, FFC has an IT steering committee, which is also a strength, because the committee develops and revises IT and security policies, and reviews the operations of the IT department. However, there are a couple of weaknesses in the area of IT Management. For instance, their Chief Information Office only reports to their Chief Financial Officer. According to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the company’s chief executive officer and chief financial officer are requires to include an assessment of the operating effectiveness of their internal control structure over financial reporting when issuing the annual report. In addition, the Vice President of Applications, Vice President of Operations, Vice President of Information Security, and Vice President of Database Administration reports only to Chief Information Officer
Would you be willing to rename the guild to its grammatically correct form, "House of Fine Foods"? I checked with ESO support, and if you submit a ticket to them (https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/ask) they will rename the guild. You simply have to specify that you are Guildmaster, it's current name, and the name to which you want it changed. You would also specify that you were simply amending the capitalization and nothing else. OG seems to have its fair share of legitimately OCD folk, so I thought it worth asking. It would be greatly appreciated. :P
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A steering committee comprised of personnel from internal audit, information systems, and the finance department are involved in developing the policies of and reviewing the operations of the IT department. This cross-departmental committee helps align the goals of the IT department and the firm as a whole, and helps establish segregation of duties at the manager level so as to establish a culture of openness. Taking this idea of establishing segregation of duties at the managerial level, we find comfort in the fact that the Chief Information Officer (CIO) reviews the logs of the VP, Applications. It is also worthy to note that the IT department has 4 executives that are responsible for different areas of the department and which the CIO is ultimately responsible for reviewing. Although the CIO manages the IT department as a whole, there are 3 levels of management, as the CIO reports to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and thus mitigates the risk that oversights or fraudulent activities will be missed. IT Management is a very important area as this helps dictate the tone of the department and helps establish the policies that are in place, but through our review of this ITGC area, we find little risk associated with IT Management and have found evidence that the audit team can rely on the controls put in place.
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