Separation of duties
Separation of duties (SoD; also known as Segregation of Duties) is the concept of having more than one person required to complete a task. It is an administrative control used by organisations to prevent fraud, sabotage, theft, misuse of information, and other security compromises. In the political realm, it is known as the separation of powers, as can be seen in democracies where the government is separated into three independent branches: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. General description. Separation of duties is a key concept of internal controls. Increased protection from fraud and errors must  be balanced with the increased cost/effort required. In essence, SoD implements an appropriate level of checks and balances upon the activities of individuals. R. A. Botha and J. H. P. Eloff in the "IBM Systems Journal" describe SoD as follows. Separation of duty, as a security principle, has as its primary objective the prevention of fraud and errors. This objective is achieved by disseminating the tasks and associated privileges for a specific business process among multiple users. This principle is demonstrated in the traditional example of separation of duty found in the requirement of two signatures on a cheque . Actual job titles and organizational structure may vary greatly from one organization to another, depending on the size and nature of the business. Accordingly, rank or hierarchy are less important than the skillset and capabilities of the individuals involved. With the concept of SoD, business critical duties can be categorized into four types of functions: authorization, custody, record keeping, and reconciliation. In a perfect system, no one person should handle more than one type of function. Principles. Principally several approaches are optionally viable as partially or entirely different paradigms: Auxiliary Patterns. A person with multiple functional roles has the opportunity  to abuse those powers. The pattern to minimize risk is: General categories of functions to be separated: Primarily the individual separation is addressed as the only selection. Application in general business and in accounting. The term SoD is already well known in financial accounting systems. Companies in all sizes understand not to combine roles such as receiving cheques (payment on account) and approving write-offs, depositing cash and reconciling bank statements, approving time cards and have custody of pay cheques, etc. SoD is fairly new to most Information Technology (IT) departments, but a high percentage of Sarbanes-Oxley internal audit  issues come from IT. In information systems, segregation of duties helps reduce the potential damage from the actions of one person. IS or end-user department should be organized in a way to achieve adequate separation of duties. According to ISACA's Segregation of Duties Control matrix, some duties should not be combined into one position. This matrix is not an industry standard, just a general guideline suggesting which positions should be separated and which require compensating controls when combined. Depending on a company's size, functions and designations may vary. When duties cannot be separated, compensating controls should  be in place. Compensating controls are internal controls that are intended to reduce the risk of an existing or potential control weakness. If a single person can carry out and conceal errors and/or irregularities in the course of performing their day-to-day activities, they have been assigned SoD incompatible duties. There are several control mechanisms that can help to enforce the segregation of duties: Application in information systems. The accounting profession has invested significantly in separation of duties because of the understood risks accumulated over hundreds of years of accounting practice. By contrast, many corporations in the United States  found that an unexpectedly high proportion of their Sarbanes-Oxley internal control issues came from IT. Separation of duties is commonly used in large IT organizations so that no single person is in a position to introduce fraudulent or malicious code or data without detection. Role-based access control is frequently used in IT systems where SoD is required. Strict control of software and data changes will require that the same person or organizations performs only one of the following roles: This is not an exhaustive presentation of the software development life cycle, but a list of critical development functions  applicable to separation of duties. To successfully implement separation of duties in information systems a number of concerns need to be addressed: