Recently, two separate professional communities "Risk, Regulation, and Reporting" and "Knowledge Discovery Nuggets" attracted a lot of interest in a topic that they briefly labeled 'the spreadsheet risk'. The prevailing argument was that spreadsheets contain a lot of corporate knowledge, therefore the related risk must be recognized and better controlled.

The Spreadsheet Risk: Benefits and risks of storing corporate knowledge in spreadsheets.

Financial institutions introduce business procedures to govern investigations of alerts and cases. Compliance analysts go through specialized training to learn how to investigate and handle compliance cases. Case management systems and quality assurance processes are introduced to streamline judgment-based decisions. Can those judgment-based decisions be aided, or replaced, by rule-based systems?

Improving Quality Assurance by transitioning from judgment to rule-based investigations.

Is it possible to file too many suspicious activity reports (SARs)? To be on the safe side, firms may file so called defensive SARs for cases where reports are not fully warranted. A large number of backlog alerts and case investigations and the pressure of time may lead to those safer decisions in situations when there are missing pieces of data or incomplete investigations.

Reliance on alerts triage can help with filing right suspicious activity reports.