More from my interview on system-access risks with Courion vice president Kurt Johnson (including step-by-step guidance on developing a sound access assurance program) …

Eric Krell: How can companies better manage this systems-access risk?

Kurt Johnson: Companies can better manage systems-access risk by ensuring a strong access assurance strategy. Specifically, do the right people have the right access to the right resources, and are they doing the right things with it? more

Keeping up with developments in indirect taxation in the thousands of state and local jurisdictions in the U.S. is a towering task, no question, but companies that operate globally have it worse by an order of magnitude. The myriad laws governing the various sales taxes, value-added taxes, and excise duties around the world are mind-bendingly complex, and they’re in constant flux.

KPMG has been keeping a close eye on the global indirect tax scene in a series of consistently useful advisories. The firm’s midyear roundup takes a broad look at developments in over a dozen countries and throws in some discussion of technologies that are currently impacting the field. more

Most of us find it easier to believe someone who appears confident — even certain — of him- or herself. Thus, the huge followings of many cocky talking heads on radio and TV, even though their accuracy is questionable.

In fact, the markets — in this case, the markets for influence and credibility — push individuals to exhibit “overprecision,” or the excessive certainty that they have the right answer, according to Don Moore, a professor of organizational behavior and theory with Carnegie Mellon University who has studied the phenomenon. That’s good news for pundits playing to their audiences or brokers recommending investments to their clients. It’s not so good for financial executives who strive to honestly convey the uncertainties inherent in their forecasts. more

How many of your financial processes are structured? Not many, I bet. More likely, to get something done you fire off an email message to somebody who then fires off messages to others. Eventually a message may get back to you with the information you wanted or that some task has been completed (or not completed). That’s an unstructured process, and it is the way most knowledge workers function today.

Gartner’s Jim Sinur, in a recent blog, describes it as such: “Unstructured process is where the process map is more variable and in some cases only pictured after the fact. … There generally is not a process flow per se.”

Whatever the unstructured process flow is, you won’t really know until it is done, if even then, and it is unlikely to be repeated exactly the same way. Not only is it unstructured, but it is ad hoc. This makes unstructured processes very difficult to manage. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be managed. The question is how. more

As I mentioned two weeks ago, a recent survey indicates that more than half of large companies have limited knowledge of which systems or applications their employees have access to.

This marks a system access problem, and a growing risk during a period of frequent and large layoffs.

If a company needs to turn off access manually (which is often the case), it may miss several user accounts that they don’t realize exist. This leaves the door open for past employees, and others, to access important data, including financial information and customer information.

To learn more about these open-door system risks, I asked Courion vice president Kurt Johnson about his firm’s research. more