In our Spotlight on Success series, Ajay Kumar, Director of IT Internal Audit of Citizens Property Insurance, shares how his team is able to achieve more without adding resources by centralizing all of their audit, risk, and compliance data in a single source of truth. Headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation was created by the Florida Legislature in 2002 as a not-for-profit alternative insurer providing insurance to property owners who cannot find coverage in the private insurance market. Hear how this team responsible for internal audit, internal controls, and enterprise risk gained significant time savings and eliminated version control issues by switching from a manual environment to AuditBoard, including:
- Leveraging AuditBoard’s RiskOversight, SOXHUB, and OpsAudit solutions together to centralize all audit, risk, and compliance documentation and easily incorporate historical risk data in their risk-based audit planning.
- Redeploying time savings from automating manual tasks to leveraging data analytics to identify fraud not only within the organization, but across the industry.
- Moving from a time-consuming process of manually creating charts and graphs for audit committee meetings to building reports within AuditBoard using real-time data and easily exporting them for the audit committee.
Tell us a little about Citizens Property Insurance.
“I work for a company named Citizens Property Insurance. We are unique in that we are a state company, not-for-profit, and we are an insurer of last resort, meaning that we have to provide insurance to customers who cannot get insurance elsewhere. With Florida being Florida, there are a lot of hurricanes coming. A private insurance company may think that this is not a market where they can make money, so they move out — and then the property insurance has to be provided by somebody, and that is the Citizens Insurance.”
Tell us about your experience leveraging data analytics and automation to help to identify fraud?
“Internal audit has been partnering with different business units to use data analytics to identify fraud, not only within the company but within the industry as a whole. Because of AuditBoard, we have reduced the time for audits so we can deliver more with the same number of resources. That frees up some time for the audit team to focus on analytics, automations, and bots. In that way, we have been able to gain some productivity and have team focus on the things where we can help not only the company, but the insurance industry as a whole within Florida.”
How has having a single source of truth helped you save time on reporting while providing real-time updates to the audit committee?
“Every quarter we have the audit committee meeting. We used to extract data or manually create graphs and visualizations to put into the audit committee report. We have automated that using AuditBoard Intelligence, ABI. Now we build the report right within AuditBoard and feed it into the audit committee report. That has helped us a lot because there’s one source of data and one version. Whatever we change, changes across everything.”
How has centralizing your audit, risk, and compliance data in AuditBoard enabled your team to perform risk-based audit planning and provide data-driven risk insights to the C-suite and board?
“Our risk-based annual planning has improved a lot because now we go and look at the previous risks, change their severity or other parameters. Based on that, we identify the new risks that have emerged, and then we create the audit plan based on those risks. We have operational risks, we have strategic risks. These things we discuss at the highest level with the CEO and the board of governors — they all get involved. Having all these risks in one place where we maintain the history and versions… that’s very, very helpful because if there is not a solution like AuditBoard, typically, companies go with Excel, they update and then lose the historical context.”
“AuditBoard is a single-stop solution for all of our audit, control, and risk needs. We use AuditBoard for all of these three things. My boss has accountability for internal audit, internal controls, and enterprise risk. Using AuditBoard has given us the single version and the single source of data that we have always been looking for.”
