ABSTRACT
Internal control has been expanding and has claimed to include risk management. Many years ago internal controls were purely concerned with bookkeeping. A slow war has been going on between the quality movement and internal control to be the dominant approach to process health and gradually internal control is winning. In the 1990s the quality movement became closely identified with quality management systems based on having documented procedures and checking that people followed them at all times. Quality management has a lot of good ideas that internal control practitioners should learn and incorporate in their work. Search the Internet for 'risk management' and one will find that some material is mathematically influenced and some is not. The conceptual bases of the mathematical and non-mathematical approaches differ radically. In the mathematically based approach modelling begins immediately because it is tackling the whole problem, not just the uncertainty. The non-mathematical approaches typically do not provide a true analysis of risk.
