Enterprise Risk Management

CHAPTER 24Enterprise Risk Management Lessons from the Field

WILLIAM G. SHENKIR

William Stamps Farish Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce

THOMAS L. BARTON

Kathryn and Richard Kip Professor of Accounting, University of North Florida

PAUL L. WALKER

Associate Professor of Accounting, University of Virginia

You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

INTRODUCTION

As this is being written, the U.S. economy is currently reeling from what many describe as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Analysts of the current crisis have been asking: “How could so many capable executives, regulators, the congress, and the administration have underestimated the enormous risk in the subprime mortgage market and related areas such as securitized subprime loans and credit default swaps.” The current crisis seems to indicate that the drive for profits by some organizations was accompanied by questionable risk management practices.

Before the current financial crisis, some leading opinion-making organizations recognized that enterprise risk management (ERM) was an idea whose time had come. In 1999, a blue ribbon commission of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) concluded that audit committees should “define and use timely, focused information that is responsive to important performance measures and to the key risks they oversee” (National Association of Corporate Directors 1999, ...