Sarbanes-Oxley

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) requires companies to make new disclosures on internal controls, ethics codes, and the makeup of their audit committees on annual reports. The result is that upper management and accounting firms are held accountable for discrepancies in financial reporting.

SOX revolutionized the way many companies view compliance initiatives. In the past, most companies dealt with governance, risk and compliance (GRC) at a departmental level to assist with specific compliance requirements. Today that strategy is changing.

Driven by the magnitude, visibility, and costs associated with SOX compliance, executives are taking an enterprise-wide approach to governance and looking for technology solutions that will best assist them in this endeavor. In addition, many companies have rushed to reach compliance in 2004 and will have to repeat the process in 2005 and 2006.

Complying with SOX becomes a rigid process that companies will need to go through on an annual basis. A company's legal counsel will typically oversee the process of complying with SOX, and because there are numerous sections of SOX touching a variety of departments and business units, companies will need to develop various methods to ensure compliance with all components. To reduce the time and expense of compliance, companies will need to

implement a long-term solution that incorporates the ability to:

• Retain, retrieve and distribute control-related documents
• Automate and strengthen internal control processes that are manually intensive and weak from a control perspective.
• Facilitate the actual process of documenting and testing internal controls
• Automate numerous compliance and audit processes
• Allow for ease of document retention, document retrievability and a solid audit trail
• Save money on the costly annual testing of internal controls.

Sarbanes-Oxley Solutions

• Sarbanes-Oxley OnBase Brochure (pdf)
• SOX Compliance Whitepaper Request