MUSCAT -- KPMG, a leading international firm providing Audit, Tax and Advisory Services, recently held a Breakfast Seminar for a select group of clients on the potential opportunity to automate Governance Risk and Compliance (commonly known as GRC or continuous control monitoring). Michael Armstrong, Partner in Charge of KPMG in Oman, mentioned that the buoyancy in the regional markets before the recent economic slowdown had allowed Government and private sector organisations to make significant investments in their core IT, including ERP, systems.
The focus of these system implementations were on functionality, features and performance of the organisations. However, one area of automation which received much talk but no investment particularly in the Middle East region was the opportunity to automate Governance Risk and Compliance. He mentioned that the need is all the more compelling in the current financial crisis, which is possibly creating an environment where the risk of fraud increases, as businesses come under pressure to show results.
Rajeev Lalwani, Partner, IT Advisory for KPMG in Oman and the UAE, quoting CFO Magazine mentioned that the GRC automation software at its core remains a tracking system capturing data on various compliance requirements as they affect a specific company and chronicles how a company does or does not satisfy those requirements. He mentioned that GRC automation could be rolled out in several different ways and KPMG had come up with an innovative solution which allowed it to provide this software even to small organisations where a significant investment may not be feasible.
He mentioned that KPMG provides such smaller organisations the software in the form of a periodical service with each periodic intervention not requiring significant expenditure. Apart from improving the control environment and providing real time information to the Audit Committees, internal and external auditors and the management, the GRC automation had other collateral benefits. He mentioned that these included the opportunity to optimise ERP implementation as issues arise, develop a culture of transparency and control risk self assessments and centralise the technology platform thereby improving the manageability and the total cost of ownership.
By A Staff Reporter
© Oman Daily Observer 2009
