What is the smallest sized company that has to conform to the new AICPA SSAE16 standards?
Anonymous (Marketing Coordinator)
| Apr 21, 2011This question was asked by an attendee at a recent Proformative SAS 70/SSAE 16 event: What is the smallest sized company that has to conform to the new AICPA SSAE16 standards?
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Answers
Company: Frank, Rimerman + Co. LLP
Size doesn't matter here - what matters is the relevance of the service organization to the user's operating environment and, for SSAE 16, to the user's financial statements. If a very small company has a material impact on many other small companies' environment, the SSAE 16 is an applicable report. If the company would like to grow, mid-sized and larger companies will look to make sure that their existing control environments will not be weakened by integrating the service provider into their organization's processes.
Company: CompliancePoint
One person...because the AICPA SSAE 16 standard applies to CPAs not service organizations. Was that a trick question?
Company: AlphaMac Resources, Inc.
In my view, the SSAE 16 reports (used to be SAS70) is primarily an auditor to auditor communication. It is used by the "user" organization to determine the amount of audit work that needs to be conducted on the "supplier" system/service if any.