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Setting Up an Internal Control System

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SETTING UP INTERNAL CONTROLS IN A CORPORATE ORGANIZATION BY OBATOMI JOSEPH(ACA, ACE ,HND (ACCA/ BSC APPLIED ACCOUNTING,OXFORD BRKS UN-IN VIEW)

Every corporate organization either profit motivated or nonprofit motivated is exposed to one peril or the other. These perils could be financial or non- financial. These could be fire, accidents, natural disasters, and other destruction of assets. But the most frequent losses that businesses and non profit organizations suffer are from theft and embezzlement. The proximate cause of this write up is to enable firms to adopt the instrumentality of building and effective internal control to discover the inherent business risks and how to eliminate or reduce to a barest minimum and acceptable level.
Your chiropractic practice, like all other businesses, must establish internal controls as soon as you open. Internal controls are those measures businesses use to guard against waste, error, and fraud. Losses can come from external sources, such as robbery and burglary, but they are most likely to come from internal sources, such as employee theft and embezzlement.
My approach to setting up an internal control facility is to proceed according to a pre-defined process that has been broken down into stages. As each milestone is reached, I check that all intermediate objectives have been achieved. Vivid transparency must be exhibited throughout all planning and implementation phases so that the opportunity to exert an influence at every stage is accomplished. Internal control in some quarters is viewed as internal audit but in respective of the name given to this unit, it has the same set of objectives.

Setting up an internal audit department from scratch is best done by internal auditors who have not only gained sufficient practical experience in carrying out audits themselves, but who have also been involved in advising

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