As was its mission, the new Assurance Services Group (ASG) has emerged as a strategic enterprise-wide resource by integrating with other assurance groups and leveraging innovation across the enterprise. This mission is supported by uncovering key insights that enhance the impact of short-, mid-, and long-term decisions.

It has been credited with improving various areas, including corporate responsibility initiatives in the environmental, social, and governance sectors; information technology and data security; and e-commerce operations. The ASG also engages with second-line enterprise monitoring and oversight groups, such as compliance and cyber transformation.

Today, the ASG offers a growing range of internal services, including preassurance readiness reviews that are designed to proactively review risk areas earlier in their evolution whether they are a project in its infancy, an emerging risk, a new technology that needs integration, or a narrowly defined problem area.

By instituting updated technologies, industry-leading practices, and utilizing the offshore resources, KPMG helped position the ASG as an indispensable resource that enables our client to uncover critical interdependencies that must be addressed to help optimize the effectiveness of strategic and operational leadership teams in a risk-adjusted manner, as well as:

• modernized enterprise-wide risk-management processes
• overall control environment, including an improved SOX program, with insight into total cost of controls
• enhanced strategy decision-making capabilities
• systems and operations integration
• detailed governance and compliance impact analysis
• ongoing management support through the constantly evolving ASG capabilities.

Advanced analytics and data visualization have enabled the client to become a more effective data-driven organization that is able to make rapid, impactful decisions in projected high-yield areas in response to constantly changing market dynamics in a risk-adjusted manner.

At the beginning of this engagement, KPMG assigned an experienced former Audit executive to lead a dedicated team of discipline-specific SMPs from across our various Advisory and Tax practices to support our client’s chief audit executive in the establishment of a new Assurance Services Group. This required a comprehensive, interdisciplinary team approach to modernize the organization’s internal audit (IA) and compliance operations.

KPMG worked with the chief audit executive to establish business-relevant annual audit plans and deploy a data-driven approach to operational reviews.

To further enhance the IA and risk-management practices, KPMG supported a new global Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) program tool with leading governance and audit management system capabilities called AuditBoard. The system was leveraged from the client’s initial SOXHub platform used by our offshore KPMG Global Services Center of Excellence to improve SOX 404 controls testing efficiency.

Additionally, KPMG helped establish and accelerate a data and analytics capability within IA utilizing a data-driven approach to operational process reviews by the ASG. This capability highlights the use of performance measures, profiling, and dashboards, as well as scorecards for areas ranging from payroll to corporate culture, to enterprise asset management for plant maintenance and plant cost accounting, to corporate responsibility.