6 Ways to Optimize Risk and Audit Compliance with Mobile Forms

In regulated industries, control and risk management keep you out of hot water. What’s the indispensable ingredient to enabling strong controls? You need to equip your employees with highly effective data. Use these six tips to plan, improve, and optimize the quality of the data you collect for compliance, audit and risk management.

Risk and Audit Compliance Optimization Tips

1. Create an Inventory of Risk Management Data

If your risk management staff members are constantly gathering data, they won’t have much time for analysis or making recommendations. The solution lies in equipping every employee to efficiently gather risk data and submit it to the head office.

To build those forms effectively, create an inventory of risk management inputs while using mobile forms to gather suggestions from your risk staff and front-line business managers. You’ll put that information to good use in the next step.

2. Gather Risk Assessment Scores from Managers Using Mobile Forms

Managers in banks and other regulated fields have multiple responsibilities commanding their attention. They have sales targets to meet, customer service levels to maintain and operations to review. If you want managers to provide helpful feedback on risk, you need to make it easy for them. That’s why mobile forms technology is a game changer.

How to Use Mobile Forms to Obtain Higher Quality Data

Use this list of questions to gather risk scores:

• Risk impact score (0-10): Ask managers to rate the impact of a risk event where 0 is minimal impact and 10 is a catastrophic impact.
• Risk likelihood score (0-10): Use this scale to evaluate the probability of a risk event occurring where 10 is highly likely to occur in the next 12 months and 0 is highly unlikely to happen.
• Risk mitigation plan: Use a free text option on the form so managers can describe the programs and projects they’re using to mitigate certain risks.

3. Improve Your Audit Performance Using Mobile Forms

A few weeks before an audit happens, you receive the request. Suddenly, you’re expected to drop everything and send a large volume of data to your auditors. There’s a way to minimize this time-consuming exercise. Using Device Magic’s enterprise data collection solution, collect data in advance.

For example, you may have a company policy to record employee sign-off on the code of ethics. You can ask employees to complete this process by using a mobile form to collect digital signatures at their convenience.

Once you have this data collected, you can automatically transfer it into your workflow system or CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive). When the auditors ask for the records, you can simply grant them access to your book of record. The result is that you get a clean audit report without the huge hassle of organizing your response.

4. Speed Up Closure of Audit Findings

Like it or not, an internal audit will find problems in your organization. If your department receives audit findings, your next step is to clarify the expectations and work to close the issues. As a manager, you can use mobile forms to close those findings faster. Consider a brief example as an explanation of how.

The issue: Employee training plans didn’t cover risk and compliance expectations.

Forms automation solution: Create a digital form covering risk and compliance training. Require each employee to submit the form when they finish training. Once the completed forms are submitted, ensure the information integrates directly into your database (e.g., SQL database, Google Drive or any other system supported by Device Magic). Finally, inform your auditors that you consider the issue closed and have collected evidence to that effect.

5. Complete Weekly Risk Event Reports

You can’t run an effective risk program when you lack up-to-date data. That’s why you shouldn’t wait for team or 1-on-1 meetings to report issues. Create a standard mobile form where employees can report risk events in real-time.

For example, your form may include the following elements:

• Date: When the risk was reported
• Department: The employee’s department (e.g., bank branch 123)
• Employee: Note the person who reported the issue in case you need to contact
• Summary: Using a free text field, provide a summary of the risk event
• Next Steps: Outline the next steps required to address the risk and any support that may be needed

6. Use Mobile Forms to Accelerate Monthly Risk Reporting

Creating detailed risk reports for senior management, a board of directors and other audiences is a key risk management activity. However, preparing those reports can be time-consuming. Using mobile forms help speed up the most manual part of the process: collecting input and comments from across the company.

With Device Magic’s Analytics feature, you can create custom reports to monitor critical business functions, identify trends and share actionable insights from the risk data collected with your forms.

Risk and Compliance: Just One Way You Can Use Mobile Forms

Visit our customer stories page to read how organizations from all over the world are refining data collection with mobile forms.