I’ve been poring over feedback to Business Finance’s recent budgeting and planning survey. One finding was really quite shocking.

We asked survey respondents (i.e., you!) when you expected your 2009 annual budget to lose its usefulness. Roughly 65 percent of respondents said they expected their current budgets to become invalid by the middle of the year. Here’s what’s even more startling: 20 percent of survey respondents said they expected their 2009 budgets to become useless before the year even began.

So, why do we continue to invest time, sweat, and frustration in the traditional annual budgeting process? Think about how much time and how many resources your organization commits to its annual budgeting process. The Hackett Group’s research finds that organizations spend 25,000 man days per billion dollars in revenue on these processes. How does that compare to your estimates? more

Two recent and seemingly unrelated articles intrigued me. One is titled “Detroitosaurus Wrecks” and appeared in the June 6 issue of The Economist. The other was “Fraud Triangle Analytics,” in the July/August issue of Fraud Magazine. How do these two tie together? more

Here are some eye-opening numbers related to systems-access risks:

• Roughly 467,000 nonfarm jobs were eliminated last month in the U.S.;

• Employees at many companies maintain 15 to 20 user accounts on a company’s network;

• These accounts grant users access to customer financial information, banking records, patient records, and other business-critical data; and

• Roughly 9.34 million user accounts needed to be shut off last month.

Are you emailing your CIO right now? more

Since I’m not based in New York (preferring to dwell in one of our country’s Best Places to Live instead), I routinely miss out on the visits GRC vendors, usually towed by their PR counsel, pay to the magazine’s office.

Normally, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much, but earlier this week I was disappointed not to have heard what the folks from Audit Integrity had to say. My trusted contact at the office spoke highly of the firm’s “accounting and governance risk [AGR]” rating (“so simple, it’s genius,” my mole told me). more