Enterprise Risk Management

Successful management of risk begins with consistent and effective procedures for identifying, scoring, and assessing existing and emerging risks within your organization. Whether your organization has an established Enterprise Risk Management function, or is looking to start an Enterprise Risk program, our team of experts can help.

Our Enterprise Risk Management engagements commonly include: 

• Helping an organization determine their overall risk appetite. 

• Developing Enterprise Risk Assessment methodology and procedures. 

• Developing tools such as control self-assessments (CSAs) and internal audit programs designed to help an organization lower the residual risk for key risk areas. 

• Evaluating the Annual Internal Audit Plan to confirm that the testing scheduled is consistent with the risks identified. 

• Evaluating the existing Enterprise Risk Management Framework to determine consistency with the COSO Risk Framework. 

• Quality Assurance Review of the prior year Enterprise Risk Assessment. 

Clark Schaefer Consulting has a proven methodology for risk assessment which can help your organization identify, classify, rank, and manage risk.

Our comprehensive process includes: 

• Gaining an understanding of your organization including its structure, key functional areas, services, and marketplace. For an IT risk assessment, this would also include review of the infrastructure including hardware, operating systems, software, cloud services, third party service providers, etc. 

• Performing interviews and reviewing documentation to identify relevant risks that may impact critical aspects of your business. 

• Categorizing each risk (e.g., technology, financial, operational, compliance, fraud) by its impact to the organization and determining the weighting for each risk category. 

• Scoring each identified inherent risk based upon the potential impact on the organization, the probability of its occurrence, and a weighted risk factor. 

• Obtaining management’s self-assessment rating for each control designed to mitigate these inherent risks to their current residual level. 

• Developing an overall risk assessment model by ranking each risk. 

• Developing a risk management strategy to cover the risk areas working within budgetary constraints seeking to balance management’s expectations with an acceptable risk level. 

• Presenting a formalized risk assessment including drill down capabilities and a heat map based on source and impact. 

Furthermore, because of increased regulatory scrutiny of risk management, it’s critical that organizations have a robust risk assessment process in place. Fortunately, you probably have mitigated many risks by your control structure, which takes the “inherent” risks and reduces the impact and likelihood down to the “residual” level with which you are currently living. 

In a mature state, your Enterprise Risk Assessment would align with your current business objectives and strategies, and the IT Risk Assessment would likewise be aligned. Additionally, your risk mitigation strategies, including the focus of the annual Internal Audit plan, would also be similarly aligned.

Clark Schaefer Consulting can assist with ensuring that your risk identification and mitigation efforts are consistently aligned and appropriately connected. 

Risk Management

Stay Out in Front of Risk