Immediate Vault Immediate Access

RIMS ERM Conference 2021: IRS Receives Global Enterprise Risk Management Award of Distinction

On Friday, RIMS President Ellen Dunkin presented the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the 2021 Global Enterprise Risk Management Award of Distinction at the Society’s ERM Conference in New York City. The honor recognized the IRS’s outstanding achievements that allow it to anticipate emerging risks and establish the appropriate culture, processes and structures to strengthen strategic decision-making. 

Navigating the impacts of an extended government shutdown, sweeping tax reforms, operational disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic and providing essential financial relief to thousands of businesses and individuals across the United States, the IRS ERM program helped the agency to remain resilient and effectively manage a multitude of dynamic challenges.

“Through the ERM program’s focus on embedding risk management capabilities into the existing structures and operations, the agency has become more risk aware,” said Jeffrey Tribiano, the IRS’s deputy commissioner for operations support. “There is also greater collaboration across the enterprise to address significant risks that require efforts from multiple business units. By effectively highlighting the enterprise-wide effects of risks, and by capturing risks on the enterprise risk profile, ERM has helped garner agency-wide attention and support for measures to help address the risks. Since IRS established its ERM program in 2014, it has played a critical role in helping the agency to better understand and respond to risk, thus making the organization more resilient and better able to serve the American people.” 

This year, RIMS honored three other organizations for their exceptional accomplishments developing, implementing and maturing ERM within their organizations. Honorees included:

  • 2021 RIMS Global ERM Award of Distinction Honorable Mention: Dallas Fort Worth International Airport
  • 2021 RIMS ERM Award of Distinction–U.S. Honoree: Eversource Energy
  • 2021 RIMS ERM Award of Distinction–International Honoree: EuroChem

“Enterprise risk management continues to deliver exceptional value to organizations, allowing them to successfully address emerging risks while also identifying and leveraging opportunities that might not have otherwise been apparent,” Dunkin said. “Risk professionals get better—and deliver better results—by learning from each other. We are so grateful to the IRS and all of honorees for sharing their ERM journeys with the RIMS community and doing their part to advance this rewarding profession.” 

Judging criteria for the Global ERM Award of Distinction include measurable, tangible and sustainable results; unique program strengths; ERM innovation that links risk with strategy or performance; and the program’s ability to build sustaining risk management capabilities. The panel comprises members of RIMS Strategic and Enterprise Risk Management Council.

RIMS ERM Conference 2021 was held November 11-12 in New York City and virtually. The program themed “ERM in an ESG World” focused on the growing risks stemming from environmental, social and governance challenges.

RIMS ERM Conference 2021: Introducing the New RIMS Maturity Model

This morning at the two-day RIMS ERM Conference 2021, attendees got a “sneak preview” of the new RIMS Risk Maturity Model, presented by Carol Fox, former RIMS vice president of strategic initiatives, and Tom Easthope of Microsoft’s enterprise risk management team. RIMS decided to “reboot” the Risk Maturity Model, Fox said, since the original model was launched in 2006, and the field of risk management had changed quite a bit in the years since, as had the world in general.

Easthope outlined how the new Risk Maturity Model was “designed by practitioners, for practitioners” with input from peers, pundits, academics and critics, to show what success looks like in mature organizations. To achieve this, the new model focuses on how advanced an organization’s risk management capabilities are, not necessarily whether the organization had performed specific actions, as the previous model stressed.

Fox told the audience, which attended in person and tuned in online, that the new Risk Maturity Model was built to “grow as the profession grows,” and outlined its five pillars:

  1. Strategy Alignment: Risk related to strategy can lead to riches or ruin.
  2. Culture and Accountability: Culture and accountability drive action.
  3. Risk Management Capabilities: Risk management capabilities encompass more than proficiencies in a single process.
  4. Risk Governance: Integrated governance leads to performance improvements.
  5. Analytics: Analytics are the engines to inform decision making and influence action.

The model is also customizable for each individual organization’s goals and context. When answering the model’s questions, risk managers will have the opportunity to specify their organization’s target on each metric. Success is then measured along five tiers, with Tier 1 being “No formal capacity in place” and Tier 5 indicating that “Capability exists in a continuous improving cycle, informed by internal/external inputs.” The model will not only give a score, but also provide risk managers next steps to help them advance their programs to the next level.

A presentation slide titled "Differentiating the Five Tiers," outlining the five tiers of the model's potential results.

As more people enter data and use the model, risk managers will be able to compare their own performance against that of other organizations and industries—though the presenters stressed that the data provided will be anonymized to both users and the researchers behind the scenes. Companies will also be able to access reports on different respondents across departments to see how answers differed within the organization.

The presenters extended an invitation to participate in the next phase of testing and to give feedback. The goal, they said, is for the model to reflect the reality of risk management today and to “evolve with the world that we live in.” Beta testing is slated to begin in December and to get involved, interested risk managers can contact the organization through the RIMS app, get in touch with Fox and Easthope via LinkedIn, or email RIMS vice president of strategic initiatives Soraya Wright.

This session and many others from the conference can be viewed on-demand online after the event.

RIMS ERM Conference 2021: Integrating Net Zero Commitments into ERM Plans

In a session titled “Integrating Net Zero Commitments into ERM Plans” at the RIMS ERM Conference 2021, Michelle Tuveson, executive director of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, led an interactive session focused on how risk managers were handling their companies’ emission reduction pledges and efforts. Tuveson told the audience that while one-third of companies in G20 countries had signed onto “net zero” commitments—promises to eventually eliminate their companies’ carbon emissions completely—it is unclear how much analysis went into these pledges. As countries around the world start to require emission reporting, this lack of analysis (plus a lack of data to assess progress) is a major concern for these companies’ risk managers.

buy azithromycin online meadowcrestdental.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/azithromycin.html no prescription pharmacy

The audience seemed to back up this assertion.

buy augmentin online meadowcrestdental.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/augmentin.html no prescription pharmacy

Tuveson conducted a live poll, which revealed that most attendees felt that their industries were on the less prepared side for net zero developments and that their ERM and net zero plans were not very integrated. When asked which group was most driving their companies’ climate action, most answered that it was investors/rating agencies (31%), followed by the board and executive management (20%), consumers (17%), and peer companies (11%).

Tuveson was joined by Joerg Osterloh, director of enterprise risk management at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, who outlined the company’s net zero activities.

buy albenza online meadowcrestdental.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/albenza.html no prescription pharmacy

With a commitment to be net zero by 2040, it had already reduced emissions across the company by 30% by 2019. The company was prioritizing this effort partially because it saw climate change risks “front and center,” impacting all aspects of its supply chain.

Osterloh credited a strategy that included analyzing how much emissions each sector of the company’s business produced, then strategically addressing each. For Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the most emissions came from drink packaging, which was not as easy to reduce as other categories like operations and supply cooling. Overall, Osterloh noted the importance of being fully transparent in the company’s net zero activities and its advocacy to influence public policy on transitioning to a low carbon future. He also stressed investing now in new technologies, rather than waiting for those technologies to mature.

At least some risk managers and their companies may already be following this advice. In a final poll, most audience members said that the focus of their companies’ net zero strategy was substituting renewable power (26%), followed by greening supply chains (19%), adopting new technologies (18%), altering products and services (15%), and purchasing carbon offsets (9%).

If you missed this session, it and many of the other sessions at RIMS ERM Conference 2021 can be viewed on-demand online.

RIMS ERM Conference 2021: Lloyd’s Chairman on the Vital Role of Risk Management in Fighting Climate Change

With climate change quickly becoming one of the most important issues facing the world, Lloyd’s Chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown stressed the importance of ESG initiatives to address the threat, as well as the vital role of risk managers, in today’s keynote address at the RIMS ERM Conference 2021 in New York City.

As evidenced by the increasing number of weather and climate-related natural disasters in recent years, the stakes couldn’t be higher for organizations and communities around the world, according to Carnegie-Brown. “Disruption, poorly managed, could destabilize our economy,” he said.

buy vidalista online sinusys.com/email/img/jpg/vidalista.html no prescription pharmacy

“Delay could destroy our ecosystem.”

Failing to take action on the climate change threat is not a sustainable strategy and will only exacerbate the damage in the future, Carnegie-Brown warned. In the face of these threats, risk managers have an important role to play in helping their organizations embrace ESG and become more resilient. “A business’s risk operations are an essential component of building ESG into the organization—often they are the driving force.

buy ciprodex online sinusys.com/email/img/jpg/ciprodex.html no prescription pharmacy

” he said. “Executives rely on their insight to power their decisions and navigate the pitfalls of new challenges. Like insurance, it enables braver decisions and more courageous action. Communicated effectively, that insight can establish a permanent place at the table for risk management.”

To be most effective, Carnegie-Brown suggested that risk managers play close attention to how they are perceived and how they interact with the rest of the organization. “If risk managers are perceived as being reactive, we need to make sure we are on the front-foot in understanding and assessing these emerging issues,” he said. “If we’re perceived as operating in the shadows, we need to be transparent in our methodology and in our motives. And if we’re perceived as obstructive, we should consider a flexible approach that allows our organizations to act innovatively and with an awareness of the potential risk.”

While it represents a daunting challenge, Carnegie-Brown saw an opportunity for risk managers to demonstrate their value by taking on the difficult task of developing organization-wide plans to address climate change. “Those plans must account for the multifaceted nature of environmental risk, they must employ the best of our skills and technologies to communicate the risk to our stakeholders, and they must be built to facilitate and orderly and urgent transition,” he said.

buy spiriva online sinusys.com/email/img/jpg/spiriva.html no prescription pharmacy

“Achieving this will allow us to carve out a pioneering role for risk management in the fight against climate change, while helping our organizations to become more inviting to investors, more attractive to prospective employees, and more likely to last sustainably in the decades to come.”