Sentence structure

Hi there. I would really appreciate it if you could answer my questions. Thank you in advance.

I wrote the following sentence.

"The dependent variable is ICWs, which equals 1 if the firm's auditor reports a material internal control weakness, and 0 otherwise."

ICWs stands for Internal Control Weaknesses. ICWs is a dummy variable, which equals either 1 or 0.

I have 2 questions regarding the sentence. First, Is the comma after weakness necessary? if yes, omitting the part between two commas, "The dependent variable is ICWs and 0 otherwise." will be left, which does not make sense.

How should I punctuate it?

Second, I wrote "reports" instead of "has reported" or "reported" or even "had reported" to make it easier as we usually do in the academic context, while we know that it has happened in the past.

Do I need to change the tense of the verb?