Staatsolie World class IAD

Staatsolie Maatschappij Suriname is the Surinamese national oil company. Headquartered in Paramaribo, Staatsolie is tasked with all oil related activities, from exploration and drilling to refinery and marketing, as well as monitoring contracts with international oil companies present in Suriname. In January 2020, Staatsolie, Apache Corporation and Total S.A. announced a second significant oil discovery at the offshore of Suriname. This came at no surprise to Rudolf Elias (CEO), who years before refocused Staatsolie’s attention to near and off shoring convinced that oil would be found. And he was right. As a a result, Staatsolie needs to further improve control over business, finance and Information Technology to step-up and redefine its place in the financial markets and between the major partners and competitors in the industry. Early 2019, an intensive program started to increase Staatsolie’s maturity level in the areas mentioned. Remember, long before oil was actually found. BR1GHT was asked by Rudolf Elias to support Staatsolie in their journey to become world class in IAD. This client experience is about our support to Corporate Audit and the added value to Staatsolie.

We started our journey to support Staatsolie Corporate Audit some years before, where together with the manager Corporate Audit, we assessed possible areas for improvement. Thi slead to a overview of areas to improve. On top of that overview was a better usage of TeamMate, Staatsolie’s Audit Management System from WoltersKluwer. We implemented TeamMate already in the early 2010’s and it always was used with high satisfaction, however given changes in staff, the added value decreased. After the announcement of TeamMate’s new product, TeamMate+, Staatsolie was one of the first adaptor of the new completely revised solutions.

As BR1GHT we were asked to do a full new implementation of TeamMate+. Our work consisted of:

• Going through all new features, do demonstrations of the product itself.
• We held many sessions to determine improvement options in the audit process given the new features.
• We held customisation sessions with the Corporate Audit team to finetune the application to the best wishes of CA.
• We trained the trainers and supported them with training materials and together trained the whole department.
• We held sessions with other stakeholders, management, GRC/Risk and IT-audit to discuss possible advantages of TeamMate for them as well.

All in all the implementation was a great success and Corporate Audit has its Mercedes to drive them towards best practice.

Part of our involvement included realising the conditions from a structure and process perspective. Together with Umeme Kensmil (Lead Financial Auditor), we upgrade the Corporate Audit Charter and reformulated the Audit Methodology. This project was part of the implementation as a separate stream and took us only 5 months to conclude from initiation to signing of the new way-of-working.

Parallel to the above we held sessions with the business, finance and IT to determine the need for them to start professionalising their risk assessments and controls definition. We introduced TeamMate+ Controls for this purpose. Staatsolie selected TeamMate+ and now as a fully integrated technology solution for business, IT, risk management, compliance and internal audit. This is extremely important for them given their global best practice finance initiative where they aim to become maximum in control of their financial processes resulting in the financial accounts. Staatsolie aims to have a full system-based audit at the end of 2024 up to SOx standards. This implies that risk treatment is company wide supported by technology, design effectiveness of controls is documented and testing of controls to prove operating effectiveness is sufficiently supported by technology. TeamMate+ Audit and Controls fully supports this all.