Controls. What controls do you have over the accuracy and completeness of the numbers your company is reporting? See Sarbanes-Oxley for details. But this accounting compliance law came into being on the backs of a bunch of really bad bean counting, wherein huge public corporations committed fraud, and its management (and a bunch of their auditors) were sent to work on their putting short games (wealthy, white man jail).
Controls involve things like gathering data on transactions from two different sources. Like, yes, the bank wires all foot...but do the inventory draw downs also foot, and do the numbers all match...exactly? If so, then great; if not, then you have work to do to figure out what went wrong, either in the reporting of the actual numbers or the mismatches that...missed.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is a Corporation?89 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is a corporation? corp-o-ration.. [Mouth saying syllables of corporation]
see the Corp in there? well it's latin short for corpse or
body so a corporation may or may not be cold and covered with maggots [Man disguised as a corpse wakes up and screams]
corporations are just legal bodies they're generally set up so that
there's a clear legal distinction between things and individual does and
things that the company she works for does let's say you want to set up your [mime artists at the window of a shop]
own mime training studio brother can you spare a mime, but then you hit a wall
one of your mime trainees becomes badly injured while trying to get out of a [mime trainee gets injured while attempting to get out of a glass box]
glass box and you get sued you lose..wow you're totally speechless so your
corporation which was basically just you ten grand in the bank and a hat rack [Laptop showing $10.000 in the bank beside a hatrack]
full of berets well it loses everything you turn over your 10k to the sue-er
the one who sued you and you dust off your hands and move on try new venture [mime dusts off hands]
tapping into your prior experience as a mime therapist well legally the guy who
sued you while working for the corporation can't sue you personally
your $350,000 home is untouchable yeah who knew miming paid so well same deal [Mimes $350,000 home]
on that untouchable-ness of your Prius and the untouchable-ness of your
collection of invisible ropes, the legal body of the corporation threw itself on [Mime pretending to move along an invisible rope]
the landmine of your lawsuit and took the blow while you just walked away [Mime artist moon-walking off stage]
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