Financial Institutions conduct an IT audit annually. Many financial institutions have an internal auditing staff that conduct these IT audits. The knowledge base required for the auditors to understand the different operating systems, firewalls, ancillary applications, communication systems, online banking, Item Processing and the advancing technology being brought into the bank is becoming overwhelming.
(more…)Category: Uncategorized
-
ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room
So this week another DVD from my queue at Netflix came in and after watching the first 2 seasons of Entourage I thought I was needing to check something out a bit more educational/useful to my career. Came across the movie: Enron | The Smartest Guys in the room in the ‘documentary’ section and decided since I never fully understood the full story at the time (stupid college kids) that I wanted to see it.Well it was an hour and fifty minutes of major successes, fake profits, energy shortages, and fraud. I didn’t watch the movie with anyone else (except Kate, but I don’t think she can quite grasp that sort of thing yet) and after the movie was over I just felt dirty. The stories of the electricity lineman that pumped all their extra money into their 401K’s and then lost it all was just sickening and sad. Especially when the corrupt executives made off with millions, and in some cases hundreds of millions! If you count all the employees of Enron and then the employees of Arthur Andersen (the accounting firm that shredded all the accounting information, they went under too) you are talking about 50,000 people out of jobs. One person interviewed said that at the height of Enron they had $384,000 in their 401K only to sell it off for $1,200 bucks after they allowed employees access to their accounts. Worse, the executives were able to move their monies WAY before everyone else, even though accounts were locked for all employees.
Another thing that bothered me is the ethical nature of these businessmen. Andy Fastow (ex-CFO) seems like the type of guy that would do anything to make himself more money. He created fake companies to funnel money through and utilized Jeffrey Skillings accounting strategies to flow billions through the company and into their pocketbooks. This guy truly disgusts me because even though he was the ‘man behind the curtain’ and probably had more responsiblility than anyone else, he still got a lighter sentence due to a plea bargain he reached. He is now going to sell out the executives he was working with.
The major reason they were able to still showing profits during their quarterly earnings reports, despite their huge losses/expenses, was due to a term called ‘mark-to-market’. This allows executives to post ‘projected’ earnings for a particular investment today even though they have no way of ensuring the projection will be met in the future.
What’s interesting about this story is all the major players of the story Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow definitely had involvement in the scandal but I think the corruption was much bigger than just those three. I believe it filtered down and out to the employed traders/analysts of Enron to the companies Enron partnered with. Everyone was focused on one thing: money.
It continues to make me appreciate the family business we run. Despite the stresses of ‘making payroll/ensuring employee happiness’ it is still great to know that we have highly ethical people working with us. And once again, I am so happy we’re small.
If interested, check here for the full history of facts.
Technorati Tags: Enron, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, corruption, money, corporate scandal, fraud
-
Careers: Keeping Older Tech Workers On The Job Longer
From Banking Systems and Technology Online…
(more…) -
FFIEC to Require Strong Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment
From BANK INFO SECURITY Web Site:
(more…) -
Did You Know 4.0 – Internet and Business
If you haven’t ever seen any of the ‘Did You Know.” series on Youtube I would highly encourage to watch them all. The group from XPlane show the new world we are living in and how traditional business mindsets and models are breaking down daily. We believe that these concepts and ideas are also moving inside the firewalls of enterprises and is not JUST a consumer fad.
(more…) -
Who we are, makes The Garland Group who it is.
The Garland Group is comprised of people with an understanding of banking and technology. Our goal is to help banks be better banks. We are open, conversational and someone you can relate to and rely on. Believe it or not, we also like to do fun things like play sports, music, video games, and just kick back and enjoy life.
-
Two Factor Authentication – The issue that just won’t go away!
For the past several months, we have been warning our customers in offline conversations that the “multi-factor” authentication methods employed by most banks these days is not true two-factor authentication. Its really nothing more than a glorified single factor. Its been our experience that examiners are not currently drilling into this, but with news like this its only a matter of time. My advice to any CIO, especially as the end of their first year’s contract with multi-factor vendors draws near, is to begin looking for alternate methods. Not only will examiners eventually require, its the right thing to do.
(more…) -
Most Common Disaster Recovery Findings
Have an IT audit for your financial institution coming up? Or need some guidance on your disaster recovery plan? The Garland Group is here to help! The following is a list of our most common disaster recovery findings for financial institutions of all sizes. We use the FFIEC guidelines and our many years of information technology experience to come up with these recommendations and make your business operational as soon as possible after a disaster.
(more…)