2021 Excellence in Enterprise-Wide Award Winners
Gold Award
The Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) is an executive agency responsible for Australia’s personal insolvency and personal property securities systems.
As a regulator, risk is AFSA’s business. The management board recognised an opportunity to improve the agency’s risk management approach to embed more meaningful conversations and effective mitigation at all levels. Supported by active board leadership, the agency moved to a critical controls approach to support effective decision making. This was supported by a strategy to transform staff attitudes towards risk by focusing on building judgement, collaboration and the use of evidence.
This approach required greater engagement and education of staff to understand the entity’s control framework and their own role in managing risk every day. An impressive aspect of AFSA’s approach is the innovative way they have embedded the new approach in their capability framework to define staff roles and responsibilities with risk. AFSA has also maintained ongoing board involvement with risk by implementing regular strategic risk walkthroughs with control profile owners. These have become valuable opportunities to provide assurance to the board that strong controls are in place and creates an opportunity for staff to identify areas of improvement.
