Item 4. Controls and Procedures
Item 4. Controls and Procedures
Evaluation of Disclosure Controls and Procedures
The Company evaluated the effectiveness of the design and operation of our disclosure controls and procedures as of June 30, 2021. Our Chief Executive Officer, our Chief Financial Officer and other members of our senior management team supervised and participated in this evaluation. The term “disclosure controls and procedures,” as defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Exchange Act, means controls and other procedures of a company that are designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed by a company in the reports that it files or submits under the Exchange Act is recorded, processed, summarized and reported, within the time periods specified in the SEC's rules and forms. Disclosure controls and procedures include, without limitation, controls and procedures designed to ensure that information required to be disclosed by a company in the reports that it files or submits under the Exchange Act is accumulated and communicated to the company's management, including its principal executive and principal financial officers, as appropriate to allow timely decisions regarding required disclosure. Management recognizes that any controls and procedures, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable assurance of achieving their objectives and management necessarily applies its judgment in evaluating the cost-benefit relationship of possible controls and procedures. Based on the evaluation of our disclosure controls and procedures as of June 30, 2021, the Company’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer concluded that, as of such date, our disclosure controls and procedures were not effective, due to the fact that we are not yet able to conclude that the material weakness described in this Item 4 has been remediated by the changes we made in response to that material weakness.
As previously disclosed in Item 9A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended September 30, 2020, our management identified a material weakness as of such date. A material weakness is a deficiency, or combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of the Company's annual or interim financial statements will not be able to be prevented or detected in a timely basis. The identified material weakness is in connection with internal controls over the revenue recognition process, specifically the failure to properly identify whether the Company was to be considered the principal or the agent in certain transactions. We determined that controls over the revenue recognition process were not operating effectively and the resulting control gap amounted to a material weakness in our controls over financial reporting.
During the period following our initial identification of the material weakness referred to above, management assessed various alternatives to remediate this material weakness and we implemented changes to our system of internal controls, which included the implementation of enhanced internal auditing procedures, whereby revenue transactions are subjected to an additional review process at the corporate level to ensure the correct accounting methodology is applied to all revenue transactions. Although we have implemented such changes to our internal controls over financial reporting as described above, at this time, we cannot conclude that the material weakness has been remediated and we will continue to make changes and upgrade systems and processes throughout fiscal year 2021.
Changes in Internal Control over Financial Reporting
During the nine months ended June 30, 2021, there was a significant change in controls related to the material weakness discussed above. Controls around classifying whether the Company is considered the principal or the agent in transactions have been redesigned and implemented, which are intended to remediate the material weakness.
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Prior to these changes, the Company’s primary procedure to find transactions that should be recorded “net” was reliance on a search of key words in the item description and stock-keeping unit. The primary control failure related to the key words identifying certain items where the Company was the principal, but the item was incorrectly recorded on a net basis. As a result, the primary identifier is not on the reliance of key words. Instead, the new enhanced procedures include review of every line item with additional levels of review from both sales and financial management.
PART II. OTHER INFORMATION
Text extracted from the filing as submitted to EDGAR. Formatting, tables and exhibits are simplified for reading; the original document is authoritative for anything you rely on.