Internal controls play an important role in a company (internal control). A company can fail or succeed based on the quality of its internal controls. Stein Mart had low-quality internal controls. For example, “…Stein Mart's chief financial officer, hired in 2009, did not learn of Stein Mart's handling of Perm POS markdowns until the summer of 2011.” (Press release). One component of the COSO internal control framework is information and communication (internal control). The merchandising department decided to apply the markdowns the way they did without any approval from any other department. This is a weak point of the company because more departments should have been involved in the decision, in particular the accounting department (press release). In an ideal situation, the accounting department would have been against the proposed write-down method because they knew the consequences of taking or recording a write-down inappropriately (Press Release). Since time is key, the new CFO should have been briefed on the issue of markdowns much earlier. If Stein Mart's internal controls had been more aligned with the COSO framework, the possibility of such errors would have been less likely.