The Role of the Audit Committee In Risk Management

Risk is a Board responsibility, which cannot be delegated. The boundaries of the audit committee lie somewhere below strategic risk, which is a Board function, and above detailed internal control, which belongs to management. However, there was no consensus about just where those boundaries lie. The flipside of risk is opportunity, and the Board should set a risk appetite for the organisation that reflects this. The Combined Code suggests a role for a Board-level risk committee, comprising independent non executives. The participants in the discussion did not think this to be practical: risk management must involve executives. There is a danger that too much focus on the process of risk management could lead to complacency or to a lack of focus on the risks themselves. The review of risk at Board and audit committee level necessitates having non executive directors with a suitable range of backgrounds. The skills mix, as well as financial, should include high-level business knowledge, for example the understanding of significant opportunities/risks specific to the business. A key aspect of risk management is understanding the culture of the organisation. Non executives, with limited contact below Board level, may find difficulty in understanding the culture at lower levels of the organisation. The audit committee's role in risk management requires a strong relationship with the internal audit function of the organisation, one of whose roles is as a ‘financial policeman'. Different types of risk should be addressed in different ways. Financial, operational and strategic risk have little in common, and their management and review should reflect the context of the particular compa

Evaluating lifelong learning networks

The focus of this short article is on the interim evaluation of Lifelong Learning Networks (LLNs) that the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information of The Open University was commissioned to undertake by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) during 2007 (HEFCE, 2008). It is not the intention to go into the detail of that evaluation, but instead to do two main things: to discuss the main challenges that the project team experienced in undertaking the evaluation, and to explore some of the challenges that LLNs are likely to experience as they reach the end of their HEFCE funding periods

Fresh Water and Smarter Growth: Restoring Healthy Land-water Connections

The paper describes water resources in the United States, discusses the principles of the land-water connection, outlines the current regulatory framework, and explains the impact of climate change. It also introduces the concept of low impact development while providing examples, and highlights how funders are having an impact on sustainable water management. With bibliographical references

A study to determine the learning experiences available during the evening hours of three to eleven

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Fatemeh Ebtehaj, Jonathan Herring, Martin H Johnson and Martin Richards (eds): Birth Rites and Rights

Oxford, Hart, 201

The three burials of Melquiades DGP

In this talk I review three fatal flaws of the DGP braneworld model, which has been put forward as a possible model for late time acceleration without a cosmological constant: Ghosts, Cosmological Crashes, and Instability of the 5D vacuum. The talk is based on work in collaboration with Charmousis, Kaloper, Myers and Padilla.Comment: Write up of a talk given at the 8th Asia-Pacific International Conference on Gravitation and Astrophysics. 10 pages PTPTex style, 3 figure