SOX Finance Service Ownership and Risk Assurance — Consulting Director

The mandate

Finance-service agreements describe delivery activities but do not reliably establish who owns the operational risk or retains the final accounting-related decision. The consulting task is to design a usable ownership and assurance model for that interface. It will focus on SOX-relevant finance services without claiming to certify the organisation's overall SOX compliance.

The deliverable is a Finance Service Ownership and Operational Assurance Model comprising a decision-rights register, risk-to-control map, evidence requirements, escalation rules and a tested pilot. Service ownership must remain distinguishable from accounting-policy authority. Each module must show where the India capability acts and where the originating or global finance owner must still approve.

The six-month contract starts on 19 October 2026. Milestone one on 18 December 2026 establishes the ownership baseline and risk sample; milestone two on 18 February 2027 delivers the designed model and pilot evidence; milestone three on 18 April 2027 completes fresh-period tests, an operator guide and accepted residual gaps. Billing follows 25%, 35% and 40% accepted deliverable stages.

The finance control director and capability operations sponsor jointly accept the work. They must identify the correct owner for a disputed service exception, reproduce the pilot evidence and demonstrate that approval has not been allocated to someone without authority. Final acceptance includes a failed-control scenario that routes to the retained decision-maker within the agreed escalation window.

The sponsor provides service catalogues, existing controls documentation, authorised sample evidence and access to regional finance approvers. Data remains restricted and case material is anonymised. Formal audit opinions, regulatory submissions, outsourcing procurement and production service migration are excluded; implementing a redesigned control requires separate approval and a documented change in scope.

What you will own

• Catalogue finance-service boundaries and retained accounting decisions, identifying ambiguous ownership before selecting pilot processes or proposing a new allocation of control duties.
• Map operational risks to actual control evidence, distinguishing design assertions from observations that show a control operated on the chosen service population.
• Design approval and escalation rules that respect global and local authority, preventing an India service completion sign-off from replacing retained executive judgement.
• Build a pilot case library including failed reviews, delayed source evidence and disputed exceptions, so the model is tested beyond clean routine service delivery.
• Validate operator and reviewer responsibilities through controlled walkthroughs, recording where segregation cannot be achieved and which authorised owner accepts the residual risk.
• Define maintenance triggers for service changes and location shifts, ensuring control ownership is reconsidered when assumptions change rather than only during annual documentation updates.
• Deliver the accepted model, fresh-period pilot results and internal facilitation guide, with unresolved implementation dependencies explicitly separated from completed design work.

Candidate qualifications

• Show director-level finance control, systems-audit or operational-risk work in a global finance-service environment. Supply a redacted ownership design that resolved an actual ambiguity and identify the retained approver. Candidates must distinguish service delivery, control assessment and formal assurance opinions rather than presenting them as interchangeable responsibilities.
• Demonstrate SOX-related finance control understanding, including evidence sufficiency, segregation, review operation and issue revalidation. Explain a pilot whose result contradicted its documented control design. Professional accounting or systems-audit qualification is relevant, but a certification without practical judgement across finance service boundaries will not meet the project requirement.
• Provide project evidence of translating complex responsibility disagreements into a maintainable decision model. Describe the test used to prove that an exception reached the correct owner and how reviewers challenged the output. The consultant may facilitate agreement but cannot grant accounting or risk authority that the organisation's own governance does not permit.
• Establish disciplined sensitive-data handling and objective milestone acceptance across delivery and retained-control stakeholders. Twenty-three years of relevant experience should include comparable functional leadership and a completed transfer of methods. Software resale, outsourcing procurement incentives and contingent fees tied to a preferred service model are incompatible with this independent design engagement.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 14 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-CON-2026-IND-24.