Checking assignments of controls to risks for Internal Control

It has become a more important role in society to manage Internal Control in industry while improper activities by well-known corporations are revealed one after another. Financial Instruments and Exchange Law is promulgated on June 14th, 2006, to impose documentation of financial reporting on Japanese listed companies. To document financial reporting, each company has to evaluate control activities in administrative work-flows. Evaluation is to check if control activities in administrative workflows prevent or mitigate latent risks properly. The decision-making criteria for evaluation depend on the evaluator and are not seen explicitly. This causes lack of consistency of evaluation. To avoid inconsistency, the decision-making criteria for the evaluation should be specified precisely. In this paper, we propose a decision-making criterion for evaluation and show how evaluation can be done with it. Evaluation with precisely defined decision-making criteria raises reliability of financial reporting. This research is helpful to construct an e-Government system for evaluations of business processes for Internal Control. Copyright 2008 ACM.