Internal control refers to policies and procedures formulated and implemented to ensure the effective operation of enterprises, protect the safety and integrity of assets, prevent, find and correct errors and frauds, and ensure the truthfulness, legality and integrity of accounting information. The objectives of internal control include:
(1) Protect the safety and integrity of enterprise assets and use them effectively;
(two) to ensure the reliable and timely provision of accounting information and other management information;
(three) to ensure the implementation of various management policies, systems and measures formulated by the enterprise;
(4) Try to compress and control costs and expenses, reduce unnecessary costs and expenses, and achieve greater profit targets for enterprises;
(5) Prevention and control, identify all kinds of mistakes and disadvantages as soon as possible, and formulate and take corrective measures timely and accurately;
(6) Ensure that all production and business activities of the enterprise are carried out in an orderly and effective manner.
Internal control is an important means of modern enterprise management. Perfecting the internal control system of enterprises and ensuring the quality of accounting information is of great significance for improving the corporate governance structure and information disclosure system, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of investors and ensuring the effective operation of the capital market.
Second, the main problems existing in the current enterprise internal control
(A) insufficient understanding of internal control
At present, some enterprises, especially some state-owned enterprises, have two tendencies in understanding internal control: first, some people are used to or even satisfied with traditional management methods, thinking that as long as they can standardize operations, they don't have to consider whether they are advanced; Second, although aware of the necessity of reform, it is easy to unilaterally emphasize the importance of organizational structure reform and ignore the follow-up and strengthening of control methods; This makes enterprise reform break away from micro-governance mechanism.
(2) The property right relationship is unknown.
At the present stage of our country, the corporate governance structure of the company is not perfect, even tangible, especially the board of directors, an important institution, has not played its due role. In the process of reform, many state-owned enterprises blindly "delegate power and benefit", which leads to the fact that the leading group in charge of the original factory director is now both the manager and the board of directors, and the members of the board of directors and the manager are highly overlapped, resulting in the absence of the main body of property rights of state-owned enterprises, unclear powers and responsibilities, and vague beneficiaries of internal control. This corporate governance structure, which does not distinguish between responsibilities and rights, leads to the owner's inability to control the operator, and the controlling subject (board of directors) representing the shareholders of the company is also ineffective.
(C) the supervision mechanism is not perfect
At present, many enterprises mainly rely on the internal audit department to realize supervision and evaluation. Some enterprises' internal audit departments are subordinate to the financial department and led by the same person, so the internal audit lacks its due independence in form. In addition, in the function of internal audit, many enterprises only audit accounting accounts, but fail to give full play to its due role in internal audit, evaluate the perfection of internal control system and the efficiency of various organizations in the enterprise to perform designated functions.
Third, the basic framework of enterprise internal control system
(A) improve the control environment of enterprises
The control activities of any enterprise exist in a certain control environment. There are many elements in the control environment, such as values, organizational structure, control objectives, employee ability, incentive and induction mechanism, management philosophy and style, rules and regulations and personnel policies. To improve the internal control environment of enterprises, we should do the following work:
1. Accelerate the reform of modern enterprise property rights system. Really realize the modern enterprise system with clear property rights, clear rights and responsibilities, scientific management and separation of government from enterprises, and ensure the effective establishment of internal control system from the property rights system.
2. There should be clear internal control subjects and control objectives. The control subject solves the problem of who controls inside, and the control objective solves the problem of why. A scientific enterprise organizational structure should include four levels of economic subjects within the enterprise, and correspondingly, there are four control subjects within the enterprise, namely shareholders, managers and ordinary employees, all of whom have their own control objectives? The goal of shareholders is to maximize wealth? The goal of crow operators is to continuously improve operating efficiency; The manager's goal is to complete the responsibility goal and obtain the true report of enterprise operation; The goal of ordinary employees is to abide by the internal rules and regulations of the enterprise and continuously improve the production and operation efficiency of the enterprise.
3. There must be advanced management control means and high-quality management talents. As a method for management authorities to directly control others to authorize and supervise the activities of the whole company, management control law includes many contents, such as formulating various management systems of enterprises, making plans, evaluating performance and plans, and investigating and correcting deviations from expectations. The implementation of advanced management control methods needs to be supplemented by active personnel policies. It is necessary to cultivate and introduce a group of talents with high quality and advanced management methods, improve the management concept, mode and style of enterprises, and cultivate all employees' good awareness of morality, values and total control, thus forming a specific corporate culture atmosphere.
(B) the establishment of effective control activities
1. Personnel control.
(1) Separation of duties. Separation of responsibilities is the basic requirement of internal control in modern enterprises. All transactions or events of an enterprise should be strictly in accordance with the principle of separation of incompatible duties, scientifically divide different responsibilities and authorities, and form a checks and balances mechanism.
(2) workflow. Clarify the responsibilities of each post, so that each person's work can automatically balance the work of another person or more people, so as to achieve the purpose of mutual restraint. In order to achieve this goal, we can design a work flow chart for each post, and clearly stipulate in the work flow chart what everyone should do, how to do it, when to do it, and the results of correct work. The purpose of workflow design should be to standardize the management process, that is, let different people do the same work according to the workflow, and the result will be the same.
(3) Bill and record control. Separate the positions of bill keeper, payee and accounting recorder; All bills should be numbered in advance, all invalid bills should be properly kept, used bills should be written off regularly by the accountant, and checked with the bill custodian in time to prevent the omission or duplication of transaction records and ensure that all income and settlement funds can be recorded in the accounts in a timely and accurate manner.
(4) Asset contact and record use. Access and use of assets and records mainly refers to restricting access to assets and important records to ensure the safety of assets and records. An important measure to protect assets and record security is to take physical and technical protection measures. In the case of computerized accounting, each post can only use its own password to contact the data it is responsible for, and the audit post can only query and audit the data, and cannot have the authority to modify the data records that have been formed.
(5) Performance appraisal. In order to achieve the established work objectives, effective incentive, reward and punishment mechanisms should be implemented to encourage all employees to participate in the subjective initiative of enterprise management and control. As an after-the-fact control of the completion of their own work objectives, each department can not only summarize the work achievements in a certain period, but also find problems and improve their work. Through performance appraisal and some necessary reward and punishment measures, the department's work objectives are closely linked with individual work objectives, and the department's work objectives will also be realized through the realization of individual work objectives.
2. Control activities of information system. In the daily use of information system, the fraud phenomenon generated by information system is more hidden than manual operation, so the control of information system is also very important. Specifically, methods such as authority control, data input and output control and manual voucher control should be adopted. Passwords should be set for all posts to prevent others from using their authority beyond their authority, and people without authority are absolutely not allowed to consult or modify data.
(c) Strengthening the internal containment system
Internal containment means that when a specific business is divided, the whole process of the business cannot be completed by one department or one person, but other departments or personnel must participate, and the departments connected with it can automatically check the correctness of the previous work. It includes proper authorization, division of responsibilities for incompatible work, vouchers and records, access control and independent inspection. This kind of restriction includes the mutual restriction between superiors and subordinates and the mutual restriction between relevant departments. For example, in the process of collecting and classifying accounting information, in addition to the preparation of documents, there must be audit and approval by the accounting supervisor; Another example is the cash flow business. The examination and approval of cash receipt and payment, income and expenditure, seal keeping, bookkeeping and other businesses should be managed in a division of labor and contained with each other.
In the internal containment, the work rotation system must be adopted, so as to better achieve the containment effect. Job rotation system refers to clearly defining and strictly controlling the performance time of each employee in a certain position according to the importance of different positions in the management system. Key positions should be rotated frequently, and there can be fewer secondary positions. The existing problems are exposed from the rotation, exposing the defects of system and management.
(4) Strengthening the internal audit system and internal audit system of enterprises.
Effectively improve the enterprise's understanding of internal audit and internal audit, strengthen the assessment, supervision and restraint mechanism, give full play to the role of internal audit, separate internal auditors from accounting and financial personnel, and be directly responsible to the board of directors. Only in this way can internal auditors really play their role, supervise and protect the assets and property safety of enterprises, and supervise the development of enterprises in a reasonable, legal and benign way. Internal supervision and evaluation should follow the following principles.
1. Constantly monitor and review the overall effect of internal control in daily work. The supervision and review of major risks should be a part of the company's daily activities.
2. The internal control system should be effectively and comprehensively audited. Internal audit should be conducted independently, and internal auditors should be properly trained and equipped with competent and effective personnel. As a part of the supervision and evaluation of the internal control system, internal audit should report directly to the board of directors or its audit committee.
3. No matter whether the management or other controllers find internal control defects, they should report to the appropriate management in time and deal with them decisively. It is necessary to establish a sense of full staff control, help enterprises achieve the expected control objectives more effectively, promote the establishment of enterprise control environment, provide constructive suggestions for improving the internal control system, and achieve the expected internal control objectives.