3 discussion responses with references each

Original information to go by:

Write a brief summary of the AIS used at your place of employment and the types of data your organization collects/uses. If you are not currently employed, you may use a previous employer or interview an acquaintance about the AIS used at his or her workplace. If you have not been employed, interview a friend or family member who has information about their organization’s AIS (or lack thereof).

Next, assume you are an accounting manager at the organization you summarized above and, reflecting on the concepts and resources covered in this course, describe the changes that you would make to the internal control structure to better protect data. If you would not make any changes, explain why. Consider the personal attitudes, values, and culture of your employees and organization, as well as ethical considerations of the data your organization collects/uses.

Assume you are an employee of your peers’ organization and explain whether you agree with the changes and make recommendations for further modifications.

3 responses with references:

1-In my previous employment, we implemented an accounts payable system. This system was designed for us to manage the payable accounts, including recording and tracking our invoices, processing payments to the vendors, and maintaining vendor records. We also use accounts receivable system, the system handles our receivable accounts, including recording and tracking customer invoices, managing collections, and maintaining our customer records. We have a payroll system that handles employee compensation, including recording time and attendance, calculating wages, deducting taxes and benefits, and generating payroll reports. We use cloud computing as well. The cloud maintains a vast infrastructure of data centers that house numerous servers and storage devices. The data centers are designed to provide high availability scalability and security. We use SaaS, that delivers software applications over the Internet, accessible through web browsers or APIs, eliminating the need for local installation and maintenance. This system enables us to conveniently have on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources over the internet. It delivers us various services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics, through this network of remote servers. Cloud computing gives us scalability, flexibility, it is cost the effective and reduced IT management burdens.

If I was the accounting manager, to better protect data and enhance the internal control structure, I would utilize substantive testing of our accounting system. I would implement strict access controls to limit system access to authorized personnel only to include strong password policies, multi factor authentication, and regular review of user access rights to ensure that they are appropriate and up to date. I would also ensure that different individuals are responsible for different aspects of the accounting system, such as data entry, authorization, and reconciliation to prevent unauthorized access and reduce the risk of fraud. I would definitely utilize encryption techniques to protect sensitive data both in transit and at rest to safeguard data from unauthorized access or interception.

By implementing these changes, our internal control structure can be strengthened, reduce risk of data breaches, and enhancing the protection of data during the process of performing substantive testing of our accounting system.

In today’s digital age, personal data is collected and used by businesses for advertising, research, and even security. Although data collection can be beneficial for businesses, there are also ethical concerns. Privacy concerns, many businesses collect personal information such as name, address, phone number, e-mail, and browsing habits without explicitly disclosing the purpose of its use. This can result in a lack of trust between consumers and companies. Discrimination concerns, data collected can be used to create personalized experiences or offer targeted ads, but it can also be used to discriminate against individuals. For instance, data collected on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation can be used to exclude certain groups from advertisements or opportunities. Lastly, the security of data collected is another concern data breaches have become increasingly common, and the consequences can be severe.

2-I am currently working for the Internal Revenue Service and we collect tax information for the federal government from individual, for profit organizations, and not for profit organizations. I would like to utilize block chain to better protect data by limiting authorization to taxpayer’s account, especially teleworking employees. I would use A.I (artificial intelligence), machine learning, and deep thinking to sift through vast amounts of data checking for anomalies and unauthorized attempts or access from internal and external attempts. The Internal Revenue Service needs to do a better job at thwarting attacker/hacker from foreign countries that are hostile to the US like China and Russia. The IRS have done a good job in the past at thwarting unauthorized attempts from outside attacks, but as technology continues to evolve so should internal control, detection, monitoring, and prevention processes. My organization is good with constant changes because tax information is constantly changing.

3-I currently work in a factory that makes hydrostatic lawnmower transmissions, snow blower motors, and some electric transmissions. I am an area lead for the line that I work and while I do not know what kind of system my employer uses for their financial systems, I do work with parts of their inventory systems. From every washer we use to the finished units are all tracked with 3 different systems. One system is on the line that tracks the units from start to finish, another tracks the parts, and a third tracks the rejected parts that get scrapped. The one thing I would change is how the incoming parts are handled because we use a different company to bring the parts in. They are located in our building and they unload and scan in all the parts that are delivered for all of our lines. After that, they then assign which line gets what parts and how many. We then have a line stocker for each line that needs to retrieve the parts for their line, scan them again, and stock them on the racks. They get scanned again when they are opened to mark them consumed. It seems so complicated to me when it would be easier for the line stockers to just unload the parts and get what they need from a list. There have been so many times that we have waited on parts or worse, the paperwork the stocker needs to verify the parts he received.

We just had this issue multiple times last week and it caused so much downtime that we had to work Saturday to catch up. Something as simple as paperwork caused the company to pay 300 people all that overtime pay. After doing a little math it cost them about $50,000. for something that could have been avoided. I welcome any suggestions that I could bring to my bosses.