The benefits of an internal control procedure must exceed its costs. Benefits, which can be hard to quantity, include increased sales and productivity. reduced losses better integration with customers and suppliers, increased customer loyalty. Competitive, advantages, and lower insurance premiums, Costs are usually easier to measure than benefits. The primary cost element is personnel. Including, the time to perform control procedures, the costs of hiring additional employees to achieve effective segregation of duties, and the costs of programming controls into a computer system.
One way to estimate the value of internal controls involves expected loss, the mathematical product of impact and likelihood:
Expected loss= Impact x Likelihood
The value of a control procedure is the difference between the expected loss with the control procedure(s) and the expected loss without it.