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Audit & Consultancy

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Due Diligence

Organizations rely on the use of vendors and business partners to sustain day-to-day or specific operations critical to the business. How well you know the vendor, or get to know the vendor, can greatly enhance your chance of a successful relationship. However, it all starts with the selection process. This is especially true of both information technology and construction. These vendors provide high value services that can disrupt your organization

Due diligence is the first step in ensuring vendor and partner selection is successful. Researching bidders’ background can be costly, time consuming and sensitive. Sometimes this process is eliminated or done “after the fact”, which may sometimes be too late. When procurement and other departments enter into partnering agreements and fail to conduct due diligence and monitor third parties, significant risks can arise.

True control goes beyond just auditing due diligence and the accuracy of individual transactions. A third party audit needs to be enacted. The audit should be a threefold process: audit the agreement, audit transactions, and audit the third party.

A centralized and standard process for due diligence is pivotal to maximizing control, economy and efficiency. Standardizing processes helps ensure relevant factors are considered and a fair and equitable evaluation of vendors is done. This process should be tailored to ensure due diligence reflects the criticality of the relationship.

For third party audits we audit the following processes:

Vendor Selection

Vendor Selection is the first important step and provides assurance that:

We track many of the common IT and construction vendors and will compare your vendor list against our database to identify potential high-risk vendors.

Bid Reconciliation

Bid Reconciliation compares the bid to the final contract to ensure that what was promised is what was contracted for, as this is the first step in getting what was promised to the delivery stage. Often we find that this is not the case, leading to questions that may uncover fraud or contract changes. Though we understand that some terms and conditions will fluctuate during final negotiations, the fundamental promises shall remain intact or there may be a deficiency within the bidding process.

Contract Compliance

Contract compliance ensures all key contract objectives are met. We start by highlighting all key contractual terms, as well as identifying the risk that the contract poses. We will then define audit steps that will ensure the contract is running as intended. This can include auditing for IT standards, auditing payments, or auditing for trade / volume discounts.

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