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Independence Management

Maintain a client roster, run annual and monthly independence attestation cycles, collect a signed-off confirmation from every employee, and document conflicts on a form linked to the employee and the client. Last updated 2026-06-17

What it is

Independence Management is the audit-practice independence process, built into TATER Ops. Every employee periodically reviews the firm's client list and attests that they have no conflicts of interest — or that any conflicts they do have are documented. The module replaces the spreadsheet-and-SharePoint version of this process with a tracked, auditable workflow:

Client Roster → Attestation Cycle (Annual full roster | Monthly delta) → per-employee Sign-off (± Conflict form)

It lives in TATER Ops → Independence, with four pages: Cycles & Reviews, Client Roster, My Attestation, and Configuration.

Client Roster

The roster is the master list of clients staff attest independence against. Each client carries a name, an engagement type (Attest, Audit, Review, Compilation, Tax, Advisory, Other), an Active/Inactive status, an optional responsible partner, an added date (which drives the monthly delta), and a restricted-entity flag (the "naughty list").

Format-agnostic import

Every firm's client export looks different, so the importer auto-detects the layout. Click Import CSV / Excel, drop in a file (or paste rows), and TATER figures out what it's looking at:

A preview shows the detected mode, the client count, and a sample so you can confirm before importing. If the auto-detect guesses wrong, the controls let you toggle "First row is a header," turn the date-grouping behavior on/off, or skip a number of leading title rows. Importing is idempotent — it upserts by external ID or by name, so re-importing an updated list won't create duplicates. .xlsx/.xls, .csv, and .tsv are all supported, as is pasting straight from a spreadsheet.

Attestation Cycles

A cycle is one round of attestation. There are two kinds:

The Cycles tab shows each cycle's type, period, status, sign-off count, and open-conflict count. Click a cycle to see the clients in scope, who has signed off, and any documented conflicts. Admins can close a cycle (it stops accepting new sign-offs) or delete it.

My Attestation

The My Attestation page lists every open cycle that's waiting on you. For each one you:

  1. Review the client list — the full roster on an annual cycle, the new clients on a monthly cycle.
  2. If you have a conflict, check "I have a conflict to document" and fill in the form: the specific client, the conflict type, a description, and any safeguard/mitigation. You can file more than one.
  3. Check the attestation statement and sign off — even when you have no conflicts. Your sign-off is recorded with your authenticated identity and a timestamp.

Conflict forms are stored as their own records, each linked to the employee and the specific client, and they surface on the cycle detail and the Open Conflicts tab for partner review.

Configuration

The Configuration page (admins only) tailors the process to how your firm runs it — because different firms do this differently:

Engagement reviews

Alongside the firm-wide cycles, the Engagement Reviews tab tracks per-engagement independence assessments (independence threats and safeguards, partner confirmations, rotation). These are distinct from auditing the firm itself and can be created via the AI assistant or the API.

MCP & Insights

The whole module is reachable from your AI assistant over MCP — list_independence_clients, create_independence_client, list_independence_cycles, create_independence_cycle, and list_independence_reviews / create_independence_review — so an agent can stand up the roster, open a cycle, and report completion. The Independence — Attestation Completion & Conflicts report in TATER Insights summarizes roster size, restricted clients, cycles, sign-off completion, and open conflicts.

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