Implement the 2025 GAO Green Book with Practical, Defensible Internal Controls
The GAO Green Book Compliance Academy is an intensive three-day, live webinar providing 18 CPE credits. The program focuses on the practical implementation of the 2025 Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government.
The 2025 Green Book supersedes the 2014 edition and applies beginning with fiscal year 2026. It modernizes federal internal control guidance to address fraud, improper payments, information security, emerging technologies, significant organizational and program changes, preventive controls, documentation, and management accountability.
This academy goes beyond a general review of the Green Book. Attendees learn how to convert the standards into an internal control program that management can document, operate, evaluate, defend, and continuously improve.
Why Attend the GAO Green Book Compliance Academy?
Government organizations do not comply with the Green Book merely by maintaining policies, completing an annual checklist, or relying on auditors to identify control weaknesses.
An effective internal control system must be:
- Properly designed.
- Implemented throughout the organization.
- Operating as intended.
- Supported by reliable evidence.
- Evaluated against organizational objectives and risks.
- Monitored for emerging risks and significant changes.
- Corrected when deficiencies are identified.
- Continuously improved.
Participants will examine how management can establish accountability, define objectives, assess risks, design preventive and detective controls, evaluate deficiencies, document conclusions, and support an overall assessment of internal control effectiveness.
Major Changes in the 2025 GAO Green Book
The five components and 17 principles remain intact. However, the 2025 revision significantly expands the supporting attributes, implementation guidance, documentation expectations, and examples.
Fraud and Improper Payments
Management must explicitly identify, analyze, and respond to fraud risks and risks of improper payments.
Participants will examine how to incorporate fraud risk into the organization’s risk-assessment process, identify vulnerable programs and transactions, design preventive and detective controls, address management override and collusion, monitor fraud indicators, and document management’s conclusions.
Fraud prevention should be integrated into program operations rather than treated solely as an after-the-fact audit responsibility.
Information Security and Technology Risk
The revised Green Book strengthens management’s responsibility for information-security and technology risks.
The webinar addresses cybersecurity governance, access controls, system changes, data integrity, cloud computing, third-party technology providers, backup and recovery, artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and coordination among program management, information technology, cybersecurity, compliance, risk management, and audit functions.
Significant Organizational and Program Changes
Management should establish and document a process for identifying, analyzing, and responding to risks created by significant change.
Examples include new programs, regulatory changes, reorganizations, leadership or staffing changes, system implementations, outsourcing, new vendors, funding changes, emergency programs, and emerging technologies.
Expanded Documentation
Management must maintain documentation supporting the design, implementation, operation, and evaluation of the internal control system.
Documentation should demonstrate how management:
- Establishes objectives.
- Identifies and assesses risks.
- Assigns control responsibilities.
- Designs and implements controls.
- Verifies that controls are performed.
- Evaluates control effectiveness.
- Identifies and assesses deficiencies.
- Develops corrective-action plans.
- Monitors remediation.
- Supports its overall conclusion.
The course addresses the difference between having a control and having sufficient evidence that the control was properly designed, implemented, and performed.
Preventive Control Activities
The 2025 Green Book places increased emphasis on preventive controls where practical.
Examples include segregation of duties, system access restrictions, required approvals, automated validation rules, vendor due diligence, contract review, budgetary controls, training requirements, configuration controls, and prepayment verification.
Detective controls remain necessary, but management should not rely exclusively on controls that identify problems only after they occur.
Management Accountability
Internal control is management’s responsibility at every organizational level. Auditors assess management’s controls; they do not own or operate the internal control system.
The webinar addresses the responsibilities of oversight bodies, executives, program managers, financial managers, information-technology personnel, compliance functions, business-process owners, control owners, employees, and auditors.
Practical Tools and Implementation Techniques
The academy incorporates practical concepts attendees can adapt to their organizations, including:
- Objective-risk-control-assessment linkage.
- Green Book control mapping.
- Risk-and-control matrices.
- Control inventories.
- Entity-level and business-process control assessments.
- Control self-assessments.
- Management subcertifications.
- Fraud and improper-payment risk assessments.
- Information-technology risk assessments.
- Third-party risk assessments.
- Significant-change assessments.
- Internal control maturity models.
- Control-deficiency aggregation.
- Root-cause analysis.
- Corrective-action tracking.
- Remediation and retesting.
- Continuous monitoring and data analytics.
- Management reporting and oversight dashboards.
Take Control of Green Book Implementation
The 2025 Green Book is not merely an audit reference. It is management’s framework for designing, implementing, operating, monitoring, and evaluating an effective internal control system.
Reserve your spot today and strengthen your organization’s compliance, accountability, and operational effectiveness.
