The mother of the problem

If you were required to read Beowulf in school you may recall how he was contracted by the king of a neighboring village to come and kill a monster who had been praying on the community. Beowulf does this, but quickly realizes that if he is to solve the problem completely he has to kill the mother of the monster. Killing the mother proves to be much harder, but necessary for the safety of the village.

A recent Linkedin question had me thinking about this. The question had to do with how to get an organization to adopt an internal control program. It would be easy to simply impose the program on the organization , but clearly its effectiveness would be questionable. In this instance the "mother of the beast" is the organization's cultural state. If the larger and more fundamental issues of common purpose, and morale are not dealt with effectively (and which might be driving the organization's resistance) the internal control program might reduce some of the risk, but it risks creating an environment more susceptible to fraud, and creating an even bigger more difficult problem to solve.

Internal controls are effective in managing risk in a business no matter how bad the environment, but they are much more effective if they are executed inside of a healthy organization.