Head of Quality and Risk Management

Partner/QRM Manager

As an audit firm, we are completely dependent on the trust of the outside world. Trust in the reliability of our audit reports and other opinions, and that the advice we provide to our clients is sound. We have several elements in our internal structure that are intended to contribute to this. Quality assurance is an important part of our work, and all work delivered by BDO is checked for quality by at least one person other than the one who performed the work. QRM is responsible for overarching quality control work, risk management and compliance at BDO, but quality assurance is primarily carried out by the client teams, as a part of our ongoing client work.

Although we do our utmost to check the quality of our work, mistakes can happen. We have established procedures to uncover mistakes made and to ensure that we do not make similar mistakes again. Our internal quality control and our training and continuing education programme are important elements in this part of the work.

Partner Steinar Andersen is a state authorized public accountant and the QRM Partner at BDO. He leads our work on Quality and Risk Management. In his role as QRM Partner, he is administratively subordinate to the Managing Partner, but he reports directly to the Board of Directors in matters of importance to the Board.

At BDO, we have a QRM Committee that deals with matters that, on an overarching basis, are relevant for the risk to which BDO is exposed. The Managing Partner, the leaders of each of our service areas and the QRM Partner are permanent members of our QRM committee. Internal experts may also attend, based on the matters to be considered. The QRM Committee meets monthly.

The media and public authorities have in recent years focused on deficiencies in the anti-money laundering work at enterprises subject to the Norwegian Anti-Money Laundering Act. The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway has recently directed a great deal of attention towards our industry in this area, and it refers to this in Reports from the Supervised Areas Money Laundering and Terror Financing, published on the 17th of January of this year.

We at BDO are committed to combating money laundering and financing of terror, and we continuously work to improve ourselves. By finding smart ways to uncover possible violations of the Norwegian Anti-Money Laundering Act – whether among our clients or our clients’ business partners. As discussed later in this report, the Financial Supervisory Authority has raised some issues where they believe BDO may not have complied with the requirements of the Norwegian Anti-Money Laundering Act. In 2020, we have implemented new tools and revised our procedures in this area, in order to rectify the issues raised by the Financial Supervisory Authority.

We are committed to handling personal data in a manner that ensures that it cannot be misused. With respect to the auditing activity, we retain personal data almost exclusively because of statutory or auditing requirements for documentation and retention. It is necessary for us to obtain personal data about employees and owners of audit clients as part of our auditing work. Personal data is stored together with other audit documentation in our CRM system or in another electronic archive. This data is all stored in a secure manner to ensure that we comply with both our duty of confidentiality and the provisions in the Norwegian Personal Data Act.