Meridian Title Corp., a locally owned title and escrow company headquartered in South Bend, Ind., completed the SSAE 16 Type 1 examination indicating that its processes, procedures and controls have been formally evaluated and tested by an independent accounting and auditing firm.
The examination included the company’s controls related to corporate governance, licenses, escrow trust account reconciliation, settlement procedures, title policy production and delivery reporting and premium remittance, liability insurance, customer complaints, information security, change management-network infrastructure and computer operations.
The SSAE 16 is designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an acceptable method for a user entity’s management to obtain assurance about service organization internal controls without conducting additional assessments. In addition, the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 makes SSAE 16 reports even more important to the process of reporting on effective internal controls by public companies.
A SSAE 16 examination is widely recognized, because it represents that a service organization has been through an evaluation of their control activities as they relate to an audit of the financial statements of its customers. A Type 1 report not only includes the service organizations’ system description, but also includes detailed testing of the design of the service organization’s controls.