Which of the following actions is associated with maintaining internal controls?

Maintaining internal controls is fundamentally about establishing measures that help ensure the integrity of financial and accounting information, promote accountability, and prevent fraud. Implementing checks to safeguard against financial discrepancies directly addresses this goal.

These checks can take various forms, such as segregation of duties, regular reconciliations, authorization requirements for transactions, and monitoring processes. Such controls are crucial in making sure that errors and irregularities are detected in a timely manner, thereby preserving the accuracy and reliability of financial statements.

While increasing audits, encouraging employee feedback, and redistributing resources can contribute to an organization’s overall effectiveness, they do not specifically focus on the mechanisms that directly protect against inaccuracies and fraud in financial reporting as internal controls do. Therefore, the action of implementing checks is the most directly related to maintaining internal controls.