The 2nd Tenet of Risk Management
In fear of recent indiscretions the Canadian Government brought on scientists who were muzzled from speaking about climate change; hackers, scientists and archivists have descended upon the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Their objective in this case is to protect the EPA's data libraries from being destroyed or manipulated by the incoming Trump administration.
The scientists and hackers have labelled themselves "baggers" and are working with official EPA librarians to ensure sensitive information sets are targeted and then archived. They are using carefully coded computer scripts that can scrape the EPA's entire data universe en masse and more information on this incredible story from the Environmental Protection Agency can be read here LINK.
[1] Censorship in an arcane context is most often plain ignorance and evil, but it helps enslave the masses by keeping them stupid. [2] Data Manipulation is information fraud, and in the eyes of a risk manager, this should be taken as a heinous crime. [3] Destruction of historical knowledge in all of its forms is fascist oppression that retards human progression; it is at the end of the day nothing more than tyrannical.
One has to question how fragile our planet is if the Environment Protection Agency needs to be saved by activists and hackers when only decades ago, these very same groups of people were the nemesis of society.
Corrupt Corporate Motives
In the corporate domain, [1] censorship, [2] data manipulation or an attempt to [3] remove a transaction trail are present in some manner of injustice in nearly all crimes. Perhaps the great sham of our times would be the Lehman Brothers affair which was played out by management designing and then executing an elaborate financial contract known as the Repo 105. The ability to move assets and liabilities on and off a company's balance sheet through Repo 105 tactics allowed the bank to continue operations while auditors and investors were unaware that the true financial position of the bank was insolvent. More information here LINK.
The 2nd Tenet of Risk Management
If primum non nocere (do no harm) is the first element of a Hippocratic Corpus for risk management, the second tenet would certainly be nihil possumus contra veritatem ~ we can do nothing against the truth.
In the domain of risk management and definitely so in audit, being as close to the truth as possible is what quantitative analysts strive to achieve. Reconciliation a control, Critical Thinking (the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form judgement), Hypothesis Testing, Reporting Receiver Operating Characteristics and Evidenced Based Range-Bound Forecasts within confidence levels are some of the techniques professional risk managers use to describe uncertainty. As with most pure ambitions in the world of engineering, hurdles will persist and need to be understood and then addressed.
Let's take a look at some of these hurdles and paradoxes that hold risk management back:
The 2nd Tenet of Risk Management | Causal Capital
I would be interested to hear form other risk managers as to what they would see as part of the Truth Tenet that should exist in a Risk Management practice.
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