Historian Toynbee said: "The decline of a country or even a nation begins from the inside, and external force is only the last blow before its decline." In the increasingly fierce market competition, enterprises generally face two basic problems: first, how to adapt to the changes in the external environment; The second is how to coordinate the effective use of internal resources. The adaptability of enterprises to the external environment is based on internal coordination. Therefore, strengthening the internal control of enterprises is the most basic work of enterprises and the guarantee of their survival and development.

First, the connotation of internal control

What is internal control? A popular answer is: "enterprise anti-fraud tools." At present, China has not put forward an authoritative definition of internal control, and the integrity, rationality and effectiveness of internal control lack a recognized standard system. In the current normative system, only the specific standards for independent auditing No.9-1are included.

The definition of internal control by the Control and Audit Risk Department is: "The internal control mentioned in this Standard refers to the policies and procedures formulated and implemented by the audited entity to ensure the effective operation, protect the safety and integrity of assets, prevent, detect and correct errors and frauds, and ensure the truthfulness, legality and completeness of accounting information. Internal control includes control environment, accounting system and control procedures.

The second is the internal control of enterprises before China takes effect.

At present, many enterprises have weak internal control, disordered internal control efficiency and unbalanced mechanism, which leads to economic crimes and business mistakes. After summing up, the weak internal control of enterprises is mainly manifested in the following aspects:

1, accounting information is distorted

Accounting treatment lacks consistency and integrity. In recent years, the phenomenon of information distortion caused by confusion and accounting fraud in enterprises is more serious. For example, the conventional system of printing bills (tickets), the system of keeping and using important empty vouchers and the principle of "internal containment" in the division of accounting personnel have not been really implemented; The filling of accounting vouchers lacks reasonable and effective original voucher support; Artificially fabricating accounting facts, tampering with accounting data, setting up off-balance-sheet accounts, spreading costs indiscriminately, concealing or falsely reporting income and profits; Unclear assets, false debts, etc.

2. The system is not perfect. Insufficient execution

At present, a considerable number of enterprises do not pay enough attention to the establishment of internal control system, and the internal control system is not perfect or the relevant content is not reasonable enough; There are more rules that are not followed. They lost their rigidity and seriousness.

3. Violations of law and discipline occur from time to time.

Some enterprise financial leaders, enterprise managers and accountants take advantage of loopholes in lax internal control to accept bribes, embezzle public funds, misappropriate or steal funds, or collude with unscrupulous businessmen outside the enterprise to illegally occupy enterprise funds.

4. The concept of enterprise cadres' political achievements and the evaluation mechanism of political achievements are not perfect.

For a long time, the assessment of enterprise cadres' political achievements and achievements is mainly based on the completion of profit targets, and there is a lack of comprehensive investigation of other related indicators. Some business leaders instigate accounting fraud in order to achieve "political achievements" during their term of office; In order to speed up the economic development of this system, some business departments overlap some unrealistic economic growth assessment indicators without scientific argumentation, while some business leaders please the competent authorities by providing false accounting information and "realize" the overlapping related indicators of superior departments.

5. The cost is out of control.

For example, in order to invigorate the economy, some enterprises allow department managers to spend a certain proportion of business expenses, but there is no clear stipulation on the scope of application of this part of expenses and no binding supervision mechanism. This has led to the extravagance and waste of department managers, leading to the loss of the original meager profit enterprises. Enterprises that have already lost money have made it worse. Look at the existing problems and reasons of internal control in enterprises at present. We deeply realize that the long-term healthy and orderly growth of enterprises cannot be separated from the formulation and implementation of internal control, which runs through all aspects of business activities. As long as there are economic activities and management of enterprises, corresponding internal control is needed.

Third, establish an effective internal control system.

Internal control is an important part of modern enterprise management, which permeates all aspects of enterprise management activities and is an important symbol to measure modern enterprise management. Through practice, the conclusion is: strong control, weak out of control, no control is chaos. At present, the internal control of enterprises in China is relatively weak. The main reason is the internal control system.

Imperfect and weak external supervision. Therefore, we must strengthen the internal control of enterprises and take some effective measures.

(A) to establish a good internal control environment.

Control environment refers to the general name of factors that have a great influence on the establishment and implementation of enterprise control. The quality of the control environment directly determines whether other controls of the enterprise can be implemented or the effect of implementation. To establish a good internal control environment, we should start from the following aspects:

1, the management authorities must establish the concept of modern enterprise management. If the manager

Unwilling to pay attention to management in order to achieve financial and business goals such as budget and profit, unwilling to establish internal control system or unable to abide by the established internal control system, the control environment will be adversely affected.

2. Establish a reasonable organization. It mainly includes: (1) determining the form and nature of organizational units, and confirming related management functions and reporting relationships; (two) to formulate measures for the division of responsibilities and powers within each organizational unit. Reasonable authorization and responsibility allocation. The authorization of each functional department must be clear, personnel should be assigned according to the situation, responsibilities should be in place according to the ability authorization, and responsibilities and rights should be equal.

3. Give full play to the role of audit. Optimizing the control environment from the combination of internal audit and external audit, the internal audit institution is the basic measure to strengthen the internal control system. External audit mainly refers to the periodic and irregular evaluation of the internal control system of enterprises by national audit institutions and departmental audit institutions.

4, pay attention to the selection of internal control system management personnel. the system of internal controls

The design is perfect. If there is no competent person to implement it, it will not work. The employment policy of an enterprise directly affects whether the enterprise can absorb people with higher ability to implement the internal control system. In order to put an end to unreasonable account setting and untrue records and enrich the functions of accounting control system, we must pay attention to the selection and training of managers in internal control system. Improve the quality of accountants. Regular appraisal, rewarding the superior and punishing the inferior.

5. Flexible use of various management control methods. Commonly used management control methods are

Plan control, target control, budget control, quota control, schedule control, rules and regulations control, etc.

(2) Establish an effective accounting system.

The second element of internal control is the accounting system. It refers to the company in order to summarize, analyze, classify, record and report the company's transactions. And maintain the fiduciary responsibility for related assets and liabilities. Under the condition that enterprises design their own accounting system under the guidance of accounting standards, the establishment of accounting system is also the design of enterprise accounting system. The design of accounting system not only includes the compilation of accounting subjects, account books, accounting statements and other contents, but also includes the specific provisions of accounting treatment procedures in various business management activities among various departments of the enterprise, which integrates abstract and essential internal control methods and procedures into concrete and operable methods and procedures in the enterprise accounting system.

Establishing an effective accounting system and implementing accounting control are the keys to the internal control system. An effective accounting system should be able to do the following:

1. Confirm and record all real transactions.

2. Describe the transaction in a timely and detailed manner.

3. Measure the value of the transaction.

4. Determine the period of the transaction.

5. Properly express transactions and disclose related matters in accounting statements.

It is not difficult to see from the above description. The core of accounting system is dealing with transactions. The company's accounting system should provide a complete "transaction trajectory" for each transaction.

(3) Establish reasonable internal control procedures.

Internal control procedures consist of policies and procedures established to reasonably ensure the realization of the company's objectives. It can be applied to a certain transaction (such as purchase payment), and it can also be applied to a specific part of the control environment and accounting system. Internal control procedures can be divided into the following five categories:

1, transaction authorization. The main purpose of transaction authorization is to ensure that the transaction is authorized by the management within the scope of its authorization.

2. Division of responsibilities. Reasonably divide the responsibilities involved in the transaction, so that everyone's work can automatically check the work of another person or more people. For example, the responsibilities of some accounting work should be divided (cashiers should not be in charge of auditing, keeping accounting files and registering income, expenses, expenses, transactions, creditor's rights and debts; Bank bills and corporate financial seals cannot be kept by one person. The detailed account of warehouse materials shall be audited by a special person or kept by another bookkeeper); The execution, recording and maintenance of transactions should be assigned to different individuals or (sales authorization, delivery of goods, customer bills and other work should be assigned to different personnel). Its main purpose is to prevent and detect mistakes or fraud in time.

3. Voucher and record control. For all kinds of foreign bills and self-made vouchers, provisions are made in terms of format, number, number, transfer procedure, purpose of each copy, signature of relevant leaders and managers, total number of details, and consistency of words and figures; To make provisions for error correction, balance check and related figure check of various statements in accounting; Implement a pre-numbering system for some vouchers.

4. Asset contact and record use. Mainly refers to restricting access to assets and important records to ensure the safety of assets and records. The most important measures to protect the safety of assets and records are to take physical protection measures, for example, to store inventory in warehouses to prevent theft, and to protect physical vouchers and records, for example, the main files of accounts receivable, insurance policies and bills receivable.

5. Independent audit. Independent audit means that verification is performed by another person or department. Through the audit of fund receipt and payment, product sales, cash management, accounting vouchers, tax declaration and material procurement, the safety and integrity of enterprise property and materials are ensured and the normal operation of the enterprise is guaranteed.

Fourth, a healthy and perfect internal lanthanum control system is the need of enterprise development.

Enterprise internal control is the need of enterprise management. In the market economy, the focus of enterprise management is nothing more than the sales of products, the recovery of payment for goods, the procurement of materials and the payment of funds, and these links are closely related to the internal accounting control of enterprises. The purpose of internal control is to ensure the efficiency and benefit of business activities.

Validity and reliability of economic information and financial reports. In modern enterprises, its main functions are as follows:

First of all, it helps the management to improve the management mode and achieve the business objectives.

The second is to protect the safety and integrity of various assets of enterprises and prevent the loss or damage of assets;

The third is to ensure the authenticity and integrity of business information and financial accounting information:

The fourth is to ensure the legitimacy of corporate financial activities. can

It can be seen that improving and perfecting internal control is not only the need of enterprise development, but also the responsibility and obligation of enterprises.