MAS requires licensed financial institutions to have an annual independent audit of their internal controls. For RFMCs, this is recommended if you don’t carry out other regular monitoring of your compliance with MAS requirements.

We can do your Internal Audit which involves us independently checking the extent to which you meet the MAS requirements applicable to you. We help you to get the most out of this mandatory requirement by using a risk-based approach. So we focus our efforts on the areas that we think MAS is most interested in, or which we think present the biggest regulatory risk to your business. Of course we look at other areas too, but where we can quickly get comfortable that your internal controls are as MAS would expect we move on to the next area.

The output of this process is a written report. This sets out what we’ve done, any control gaps we’ve found, and our recommended remedial action. We also rate our findings so that you know which you should prioritise.

For Singapore financial institutions that are part of a group which is subject to another independent audit process – perhaps the UK’s SSAE-16 – we can narrow our scope, focusing only on the Singapore-specific requirements that won’t be looked at by your group provider.

We are willing to carry out the Internal Audit for our ongoing support clients. We sit down with those clients to agree a scope for our overall service which everyone is comfortable with, and which means that the Internal Audit is appropriately independent. For instance, we’re very careful that we don’t put ourselves in a position where we critique our own advisory work.