Helping Your Management Team Clearly Identify and Evaluate Risk at the Entity and/or Business-Process Level
We use industry-leading risk assessment models that are populated by benchmarking against industry standard risk factors and strategic risk and control self-assessment workshops, which help to identify, evaluate and assess potential areas of risk to your organization.
How Can I Benefit from a Risk Assessment?
A risk assessment helps mitigate your potential losses due to error, fraud, inefficiency, failure to comply with statutory requirements and actions that may have a negative effect on your organization. If your organization has ever asked these questions, a risk assessment may be right for you:
- How do we identify and get out in front of
emerging risk? - Have we adequately considered down-side risk to our business objectives?
- What could go wrong?
- Where is the greatest risk that something will
go wrong? - If something goes wrong, what is the impact?
- How often could it happen?
- How can the risk be mitigated?
The Systematic Risk Assessment Process Defined
A systematic risk assessment is a process used to identify risk and potential audit areas based on specific risk factors related to your operations and internal controls in order to provide assurance that risk tolerance is within management’s expectations. The process involves the creation of a Risk Management Team (“RMT”) comprised of client and consultant staff. A risk assessment model is used to rank and prioritize potential audit areas through a series of surveys, questionnaires and strategic interviews, as well as the combined judgment and expertise of your risk management team. The result is an audit plan that provides a tool for assigning available audit personnel to your highest areas of risk, defining an audit population and prioritizing the audits conducted.
The audit plan may consist of the following types of audits:
- Financial, Operational and/or Compliance Audits
- Information Technology Audits
- Internal Control Reviews
- Internal Reviews (where fraud is suspected)
- Fraud Examinations
- Special Projects
Our Approach and Methodology
Cherry Bekaert incorporates an interactive approach to documenting and assessing an organization’s exposure to fraud, waste and unauthorized activities. We utilize two different methodologies: Industry-Specific Risks and Enterprise-Wide Risks, which ensures that Cherry Bekaert will tailor the risk assessment to your organization’s needs.