PAC Inc.’s Audit Readiness and Regulatory Interpretation Practice enables our clients to implement a proactive program with the appropriate level of checks and balances required to meet regulatory and internal control requirements. Through a combination of process mapping, data validation, and future preparedness a focus is placed on achieving the optimal balance between controls and productivity.

Audit Readiness and Regulatory Interpretation:

• Highly effective explanation of process, underscoring management awareness, ownership and accountability, checks and balances, and understanding of dependencies.
• Review and interpretation of applicable regulation, internal controls, and policies with emphasis on manner in which they apply to each business area.
• Iterative data validation approach resulting in traceability, increased data accuracy and controls, improved data understanding, and clearly defined data ownership.
• Framework for ongoing process evaluation and improvement including process management standards, performance measurements, transparency at all levels, focus on areas of concern, and recommended organizational or procedural changes.
• Documentation, training, and knowledge transfer
• Enhanced management tools for continued awareness

Given the broad range of compliance issues that face firms today and the functional areas impacted, we need to first narrow our scope to those areas where we have realized measurable success. This is primarily in the IT space yet covers a range of offerings for our firm; from documentation of requirements (both business and technical) to process mapping to IT controls assessments. Each of these offerings provides PAC with a unique insight into a company’s needs and can allow for peripheral expansion of work (software development, testing and testing automation, organizational redesign, etc). In the past, we have pitched a concept of audit / controls readiness. In a time where “compliance” is rapidly changing, companies are continually faced with managing a process of regulation and rules interpretation and implementation.

In summary, the specific compliance areas where we have experience and know-how are as follows; Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance assessments and remediation, Process Mapping (an intertwined component of SOX), Business and Technical Documentation and, creation of Management Dashboards to ascertain current state views of their IT organization.

PAC’s Unique Ability

Similar to a number of areas PAC currently focuses on, our primary uniqueness is in the people we deploy and the leadership within our firm. In an environment of regulatory interpretation, it pays to have personnel who have “been there and done that”. Given both our individual and corporate experience in this space, from having been through extensive SEC reviews in prior work experience, to project work we have completed, we are well positioned to see an approach and methodology which will resonate not necessarily in content but in reference-able work done using this methodology.

Given the amount of work we have done with both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the last years, and given the regulatory difficulties each firm has weathered, our experience merits credibility. While nothing we have done is patentable, we have a repeatable approach to each of the aspects described above that, coupled with resumes of our senior staff and a great many currently deployed resources, gives us a unique edge.

PAC brings:

• Business knowledge and experience interfacing with regulators, auditors, and legal counsel.
• Documentation experts (user guides, reverse engineering of software to produce requirements.
• Technology experience spanning both business and technology.
• Experience using toolsets for modeling both business process as well as technology.
• Experience building management dashboards for measuring progress and monitoring status.