Segregation of Duties: Examples of Roles, Duties & Violations

This is why SoD should be a key part of any effective risk management approach in any enterprise. This ensures your organization’s security is strengthened, and compliance with SoD capabilities is maintained. It helps prevent unauthorized data breaches by promptly revoking access for terminated employees or those with outdated privileges. Zluri’s IGA solution streamlines the user access review process in your organization. This powerful platform offers a centralized hub where security, GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) teams, and auditors can effortlessly review and report on user access.

Step 1: Identify the Actors

In essence, the matrix is a proactive measure that safeguards your IT infrastructure from both intentional and unintentional harm. Examples include separating duties related to authorization, recording, and reconciling financial transactions. For instance, the person approving a purchase should differ from the one authorizing payment. Zluri’s IGA platform offers a comprehensive solution, centralizing access management and simplifying compliance efforts.

Step Segregation of Duties Checklist

To successfully segregate incompatible duties, your team must first understand the nature of all processes, roles, and tasks performed by the business. Many organizations create a visual representation of processes, helping map activities and duties to roles within their workflow. Role engineering, which defines position access rights and responsibilities and enterprise resource planning (ERP), can help clarify business roles and duties. You can implement SoD to ensure that critical functions, such as access management, data handling, and financial transactions, are performed by different individuals.

Topics and solutions

• He has over three decades of experience as an auditor and security professional, along with corporate IT executive management.
• The prohibition may be in place due to internal company policy or an external industry regulation.
• He concentrates on the telecommunications and finance industries, and his areas of expertise include business continuity, IT governance and compliance, information security and service management.
• In this blog, you’ll learn how a segregation of duties matrix helps to address this challenge.
• Those are the areas where the risk of fraud and theft is highest and has the greatest chance of negatively impacting the organization’s finances, security, reputation or compliance posture.
• Zluri’s automation engine streamlines onboarding and offboarding processes, dynamically adjusting permissions based on roles.
• For example, with inadequate SoD, the purchasing department and the CEO might be assigned conflicting duties, such as being responsible for both generating a request (REC) and authorizing it (AUT).

For example, Employee 2 is authorized to approve payments, so they should not be verifying and entering invoices, issuing payments, or updating accounting records. There are cases when, in the table, an actor has assigned two duties (e.g., an AUT and an REC duty) that, according to the rules, should be incompatible. However, the incompatibility may not pose any sod matrix risk because different duties are performed by the same organizational unit, but on different assets. To assess incompatible duties, it is useful to set up a matrix highlighting possible conflicts (figure 3). Activities should be listed in the rows and columns of a spreadsheet (along with the related classifications), thus creating an n x n matrix, where n is the number of activities.

How to Conduct an Effective Information Systems Audit: A Practical Guide

Or, you may be relying on the out-of-the-box roles within each of your business applications rather than a centralized process. This TrustCloud document provides a comprehensive guide to developing and implementing a segregation of duties (SoD) matrix. It explains the purpose, components, and benefits of an SoD matrix, offering a step-by-step process for creation and highlighting best practices. The document also addresses common challenges and mistakes, providing examples and checklists to aid implementation. Developing a segregation of duties matrix emerges as a strategic imperative as organizations strive for operational excellence and financial integrity. Organizations overlooking the need to implement a SOD control are risking a great deal–starting with the increased possibility of more errors going undetected and opportunities for fraud.

• Since the number of activities was reduced, this approach led to a more effective and focused examination of possible SoD conflicts when validating results with the process owners.
• Role-based access control, multi-level approval hierarchy, and transparent approval processes ensure efficient access management aligned with organizational policies.
• A segregation of duties matrix is a crucial tool for enhancing internal controls, ensuring the separation of responsibilities, and mitigating risks within an organization.
• Functional areas are distinct sections that group related tasks and responsibilities together based on their nature and purpose.
• Segregation of Duties (SoD) is good business practice to prevent individuals or roles from being given too much decision-making authority, which could – inadvertently or maliciously – cause greater harm to the business.
• This enhances security and compliance efforts, ensuring prompt access provisioning and revocation.

SoD is applicable across various industries, including financial departments, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology. Any organization handling sensitive information, financial transactions, or critical processes can benefit from implementing SoD. You can implement SoD to establish clear lines of responsibility and accountability within financial systems, ensuring that transactions are properly authorized, recorded, and reported. This segregation of duties contributes to the accuracy and reliability of financial reports, enabling you to make sound financial decisions based on trustworthy information.

A SoD matrix or set of matrices can be reviewed for SoD conflicts with each Join-Move-Leave access request to determine if the execution of the request would provide a segregation of duties conflict. Of course, again, if a set of manual SoD matrices is being used in the provisioning process to review for toxic SoD combinations, it will be a large manual effort, prone to errors. An automated segregation of duties solutions, integrated directly into an IGA solution for provisioning user access is the preferred approach to ensure strong controls around a compliant provisioning process.

You may have noticed instances where a lack of proper checks and balances leads to unauthorized access or financial discrepancies. These situations not only compromise security but also tarnish your company’s reputation. The stress of constantly monitoring these risks can be overwhelming for you and your team. As a result, most organizations apply SoD to only the most vulnerable or mission-critical elements of the business.

How can your organization protect itself from the danger of too much responsibility falling to one person and the increased organizational risk this can bring? This article will discuss segregation of duties–an internal control that’s critical in helping today’s organizations minimize risk across the enterprise. Moreover, with clearly defined access processes, accountability becomes more apparent. You can track and audit user actions more effectively, which is essential for regulatory compliance and internal governance.