As a co-founder of the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO), IMA has contributed to the latest COSO exposure draft, titled
Internal Control over External Financial Reporting (ICEFR): Compendium of Approaches and Examples, and encourages small businesses to provide input. The exposure draft was announced on September 18 by COSO: www.coso.org.
In conjunction with the release of the
Compendium, COSO is also making available the revised version of its updated
Internal Control-Integrated Framework and proposed
Illustrative Tools to assist users in assessing the effectiveness of internal controls.
IMA has monitored this project closely as a result of Dr. Sandra B. Richtermeyer, CMA, CPA, IMA's immediate former chair-emeritus, serve as IMA's representative on the COSO Board. Also, J. Stephen McNally, CPA, global board member of IMA, has represented IMA in a COSO Advisory Council that has specific focus towards this project. Under Stephen's leadership, IMA has an internal COSO Advisory Panel that has provided feedback to COSO and a team from PwC that has been involved with this project, to ensure that the documents distributed under public release are of high quality.
Please read IMA's press release that appeared in Business Wire that expresses IMA's position on the project's impact on Small Businesses at
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120918006623/en/IMA-Stresses-Importance-COSO-Exposure-Draft-Small. It also has been featured in Accounting Web at
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/ima-stresses-importance-coso-exposure-draft/219877.
I encourage all IMA members, especially small business practitioners to review the documents under COSO's recent release. IMA's COSO Advisory Panel has plans to provide comments to COSO and the PwC team about the recently released documents informally and in the context of a comment letter prior to the closing of the public release comment period. Please share any thoughts you may have with me at LMills@imanet.org that can be considered for comments we share with COSO.