SSAE-16 and SOC-1 - Assessment of Controls for Financial Reporting

The Tip of the Night for February 26, 2019 discussed the SOC 2 Cloud Security Standard, the cloud security certification offered by AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. When considering whether or not to use a vendor to host data in the cloud, check to see if it has also completed an AICPA SSAE-16 examination performed by one of the Big Four accounting firms. A good vendor will have done both SOC 2 and SSAE-16 examinations. The SOC 1 reports that a SSAE-16 audit issues will review how the data center's controls affect their financial reporting. SSAE-16 stands for Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16.

SOC 2 focuses on the security and privacy of data when it's stored and in transit. It checks the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of data. SSAE-16, and the SOC 1 Type 1 and Type 2 reports address the sufficiency of internal controls for the purposes of financial reporting.

SSAE-16 is the audit conducted before a SOC 1 report is issued which assesses how comprehensive a data center's controls are. After a first report giving an evaluation of the data center at a given point in time, and second SOC 1 report will be prepared that shows the condition of the data center's control system over time.

Preparing a PDF of a PowerPoint Slide Capturing Each Animated Step

Massimo Rimondini has done everyone who has to prepare a PDF or hard copies of PowerPoint presentation a great favor by developing an add-in for PowerPoint which will separate each animated step in a presentation onto a separate slide automatically. PPspliT is available as a free download here: https://www.maxonthenet.altervista.org/ppsplit.php

After it is installed, a new tab will appear on the ribbon named, 'PPspliT'. Here you'll see if you have the option to split up the presentation of each animated object which is triggered by a click.

Be sure to first save the master version of the slide show as a copy. Check off the option to preserve slide numbers, so it's easy for the reader to find their place in the hard copy when viewing the live presentation.

After the 'Split animations' button is clicked, the add-in will create new slides - one for each object that you have animated. In presentation mode, a simple enough PowerPoint should function the same way. The result will allow you to distribute the show as a PDF, or print it as a hard copy without the animated steps obscuring any detail that falls underneath another object as the animation is run. You'll also have a hard copy which will function like a flip book, creating an animated effect the old-fashioned way.

As always, Litigation Support Tip of the Night tested the demonstrated technique and confirmed that it worked. I used PowerPoint 2019 tonight.

Excel formula to check to see if a cell contains a string

The SEARCH formula used in conjunction with the ISNUMBER formula in Excel will allow you to search for a particular string inside the contents of a cell. So in this example the formula:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("whale",A2)),A2,B1)

. . . will search the contents of cell A2 for the string 'whale'. If a result is found, the formula will pull the data from cell A2. If it is not found the result from cell above will be entered. When the formula is pulled down the column will be populated only when a hit is found.

Using this formula has an advantage over simply using the contains option in a filter on the column. If you have raw text for multiple documents, and you want to pull the date for each or the title for each, and there is a unique identifier for those values you can search for (and a break indicating where documents begin and end), you can create an index that will have the searched for value in a column. As shown in this example the date is then directly associated with the Bates number for different documents.