Section B – TWO questions ONLY to be attemptedShop Reviewers Online （SRO) was founded in 2

Section B – TWO questions ONLY to be attempted

Shop Reviewers Online (SRO) was founded in 2010 by Amy Needham. She felt that many customers buying from online stores were misled by advertising and that too often, purchased products turned out to be unreliable, faulty or failed to meet the customers’ expectations. Amy believed that the online retail industry was increasingly acting unethically, caring only for profits at the expense of the needs and expectations of customers.

Consequently, she set up SRO to ‘provide an unbiased review of online stores to ensure the customer has all available information’. The company offers reviews of current online stores and provides direct links for customers to shop at the stores featured on its site. The reviews include price comparisons, provided by SRO, as well as general reviews provided by registered users of the site. The company has two main revenue streams. The first is advertising revenue from online stores who place advertisements on the SRO site. The second revenue stream is commission from sales by online stores to customers who have clicked on the sponsored links provided on the SRO website. This commission is only paid by stores who have entered into such a commission arrangement with SRO.

SRO relies upon its website being available online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For this reason it has backup servers running concurrently with the main servers on which data is processed and stored. The servers are directly linked so that any update to the main servers automatically occurs on the backup. The servers are all housed in the same computer centre in the company head office. The computer centre has enhanced its security by implementing a fingerprint recognition system for controlling access to the site. However, as the majority of staff at headquarters are IT personnel, and often temporary staff are hired to cover absentees, the fingerprint recognition system is not comprehensive and, to save time, is often bypassed. Similarly, to save time needed to set up new permanent staff with passwords to access the company’s systems, a general ‘administrator’ user has been created, with the password ‘password’. Many temporary staff access the system in this way.

SRO has an intelligent software application which constantly searches the internet for product price changes, uploading these into the reviews of the online store in question. Sometimes, however, there have been problems. Usually this is when the application has not recognised an outdated page and has replaced the correct latest price with an old price found on the outdated page. Furthermore, this intelligent software application needs permanent continual access to the internet, and SRO has identified a problem with its firewall which has prevented the software application from sometimes updating the internal systems. For this reason, it has removed the firewall protection to help ensure that the correct up-to-date prices of all online stores are shown on the website.

SRO rarely generates other elements of reviews (such as product experience), leaving this to registered users of the site. However, it will, occasionally, submit its own review to help boost a store which pays a higher commission rate than its competitors. SRO is always honest in its reviews, but the more reviews a store has, the higher up the search list it appears, when a customer searches for a specific product.

Registered users can submit as many reviews as they wish. Unregistered users may also submit reviews, which will be published under the name ‘anonymous’, but these reviewers will be unable to comment on the reviews of others. SRO checks reviews for appropriate content, but does not contact the store to verify the accuracy of the review.

SRO is about to undertake an audit of the adequacy of its general and application IT controls. In addition, SRO is currently undertaking an internal ethical governance audit, which has identified two main areas of concern:

(1) Commercial conflicts of interest

As mentioned earlier, SRO’s business objective is to ‘provide an unbiased review of online stores to ensure the customer has all available information’. However, the audit has revealed that both SRO’s revenue streams may cause an ethical dilemma with regards to this objective.

(2) Company offices

SRO has little need for traditional offices, as it does not have a direct customer-facing role. It mainly requires IT technicians to support its automated services. The company has carried out research which suggests that the IT skills it requires could be sourced at a much lower rate overseas. It is considering relocation to one such country. This country has low rates of corporation tax and cheaper labour costs. However, the country itself is poorly regulated and does not have legislation concerning the quality of information systems or the security of data contained within them, particularly relating to personal data. The culture of the country is such that accepting unauthorised payments for services is also not unusual. Whilst SRO does not condone this in its code of conduct, it is aware that such issues exist in the country under consideration.

Required:

(a) Evaluate the adequacy of the general and application controls in place within SRO, with respect to its information technology and information systems. Suggest any improvements you consider to be necessary. (15 marks)

(b) Assess the corporate governance and ethical dilemmas identified by SRO in its possible relocation to the foreign country and discuss the implications of these on organisational mission, purpose and strategy. (10 marks)