COVID-19 RESPONSE STRATEGY

Building a Post-
Pandemic Future:
3 Tools for Assessing Current and Emerging Risks
The Pandemic Assessment Toolkit

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is not only a global health crisis of

immense proportion, but also points to an imminent restructuring of the global
economic order. Organizations that can successfully develop and implement a
plan that anticipates risks and formulates appropriate mitigation strategies will
experience the quickest path to recovery once the crisis begins to dissipate.

One question that is top of mind for most audit, risk, and compliance leaders
managing the business impact of the pandemic is:

How do we chart a path to the “new normal”

once the crisis has passed?

This whitepaper explores how audit, risk, and compliance professionals

can identify current and future challenges resulting from the pandemic, as
well as how to develop and implement effective mitigation plans and track
them through resolution. Specifically, it details approaches to the following
procedures, which form the foundation of an effective pandemic response plan:

• Perform a Business Impact Assessment

• Perform a Control Impact Assessment

• Identify and Assess New and Emerging Risks

This whitepaper also introduces AuditBoard’s Pandemic Assessment

Toolkit, which provides three ready-to-use pandemic assessment
program templates, and details how the AuditBoard platform can help
you manage each phase of pandemic response and recovery.

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Part I: Identifying Current Challenges

1 Perform a Business Impact Assessment

Across industries, organizations are in various stages of determining their state of
operations and prioritizing organizational weaknesses highlighted by the pandemic.

The most effective way to get a pulse on crisis management is to perform a

business impact analysis of key business units, focusing on people, processes,
and technology. As your organization adjusts its workforce infrastructure to meet
operational needs, aim to quickly survey key business process or unit leads to collect
information on areas impacted by the pandemic and the risks to the business.

SURVEYING PROCESS OWNERS

Companies that are still struggling to roll out infrastructure for remote work or that
have not yet performed a business impact analysis should begin by surveying their
business process owners. This survey is the most effective and efficient way for the
organization to gather data on operational challenges experienced on the front lines
of the business. Upon aggregating the survey results, internal audit and business
continuity teams can visualize the data to identify problem areas, prioritize them,
and develop a balanced mitigation strategy.

Virtual table-top procedures or a light risk assessment can be employed to conduct

this survey. The survey should collect, at minimum, the following information
relating to each of the critical business processes:

• Team

• Business Process

• In-Person Contact Required

• Technology Required

• Office Closure Impact (Total Output, Degraded Performance, No

Impact)

• Management Response (Accept / Mitigate)

• Owner

• Remediation Plan

• Do we have a communication structure established?

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HOW AUDITBOARD CAN HELP

The AuditBoard Pandemic Assessment Toolkit includes a ready-to-use survey

covering the critical topics above to help facilitate your organization’s business
impact analysis. AuditBoard’s intuitive, cloud-based platform supports remote work
by centralizing remote collaboration and communication with business process
owners. Quickly create, edit, and mass-send business impact surveys with just a
few clicks, and see survey results automatically aggregate in one place for analysis.

Business Impact Assessment in AuditBoard

2 Perform a Control Impact Assessment

Organizations everywhere are experiencing significant changes to
their control environments. Failure to identify critical controls may
result in material misstatements that can harm the organization.
This is why it is crucial to validate critical controls and identify
potential control failure as a result of the pandemic crisis.

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SURVEYING CONTROL OWNERS

Internal Audit and SOX teams can help their organizations quickly identify
and document control environment changes by surveying their organization’s
control owners. Upon aggregating the results, they can then detect gaps in
risk coverage and develop mitigation strategies to limit the risk exposure.

Identifying and documenting these changes can be challenging with the

majority of the workforce working remotely. This survey should include
a brief description of the control along with the control activities, and
may include critical questions for control owners who will experience
challenges in executing the control with a distributed workforce.

HOW AUDITBOARD CAN HELP

The AuditBoard Pandemic Assessment Toolkit includes a pre-built

survey to facilitate gathering feedback from critical control owners
and help identify potential control failures. AuditBoard’s cloud-based
platform empowers internal auditors to streamline the entire control
certification process while remotely collaborating with control owners.
The Owner Dashboard helps control owners by providing a single
location to view and remotely access all their actionable items.

Control Impact Assessment in AuditBoard

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Part II: Addressing Future Challenges

Black swan events such as the current pandemic crisis can expose
areas of operational weakness and risk in an organization. Over the
next several months, emerging risks resulting from the pandemic will
continue to evolve as the world moves into the next phases of recovery.

To recover from the crisis and ensure business objectives will continue to be
met, businesses must reevaluate their risk resilience across the organization.
One key to addressing near term challenges is to perform an assessment of
the critical risks facing the business so that top risks can be reprioritized.

3 Perform a Risk Assessment

Performing a risk assessment can help executive leadership,
internal audit, and risk management teams identify emerging
issues that threaten the business’s top strategies and ensure they
are adequately managed. This lays the groundwork to prioritize
efforts and define mitigation strategies for the highest risks.

SURVEYING EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP

AuditBoard surveyed executives from its customer base of Fortune 500

to Fortune 10 companies, and identified ten top risks common across
industries. Internal audit, risk, and compliance teams leading the risk
assessment initiative should consider the following Top 10 Risks:

1. Economic slowdown and slow recovery

2. Compliance

3. Cash flow and liquidity

4. Supply chain and vendor management

5. Damage to reputation and brand

6. Employee safety

7. Business interruption

8. Regulatory changes

9. Succession planning

10. Innovation and engineering impact

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HOW AUDITBOARD CAN HELP

As part of AuditBoard’s Pandemic Assessment Toolkit, we have created

a ready-to-use risk assessment to solicit feedback from the stakeholders
and identify new and emerging risks facing the business. In AuditBoard,
auditors can quickly solicit risk data and feedback from risk owners around
the world, and stakeholders can complete risk assessments on new or
emerging risks resulting from COVID-19 within just a day. The platform can
automatically aggregate and centralize responses for ease of analysis and
assessment by the risk committee and executive management. Auditors
can also easily create real-time risk reports, including risk heat maps.

Risk Assessment in AuditBoard

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Onward: Toward the New Normal and
Post-Pandemic Future

Leveraging the steps outlined above, business leaders have the

opportunity to lay the foundation today for a successful recovery
from the COVID-19 crisis. Now more than ever, audit, risk, and
compliance leaders have the chance to play a critical role in helping
their organizations shape their recovery plan and ensure the quickest
path to the new normal once the current crisis dissipates. Armed with
cutting-edge knowledge, resources, and technology, business leaders
can navigate through the pandemic and restore operational efficiency.

To schedule a walkthrough of AuditBoard’s Pandemic Assessment

Toolkit, including 3 pandemic assessment program templates, visit:

https://www.auditboard.com/contact-us/
request-demo-pandemic-assessment-toolkit/

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Contact Us
For additional questions or information on this topic, please contact:

Anand Bhakta
Sr. Director of Risk Solutions, AuditBoard

abhakta@auditboard.com

Anand Bhakta, CISA, is the Sr. Director of Risk Solutions at AuditBoard, a cloud-based
software solution to help streamline and automate internal audit and compliance activities.
He has over fifteen years of IT audit and consulting experience. Anand specializes in risks
and controls related to the implementation of ERP systems, and he has helped various
multinational companies evaluate and/or implement application controls in ERP systems
including Oracle Financials, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Anand is recognized for his ability to develop
and implement agile auditing programs and data analysis tools. Additionally, he has assisted
clients with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance from both an advisory and attestation perspective.

About AuditBoard

AuditBoard is the leading cloud-based platform transforming how enterprises manage risk. Its
integrated suite of easy-to-use audit, risk, and compliance solutions streamlines internal audit, SOX
compliance, controls management, risk management, and workflow management. AuditBoard’s
clients range from prominent pre-IPO to Fortune 50 companies looking to modernize, simplify,
and elevate their functions. AuditBoard is the top-rated audit management software on G2, and was
recently ranked as the third fastest-growing technology company in North America by Deloitte.

For more information: www.auditboard.com