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| Thought Paper |
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Sarbanes-Oxley Act: Leveraging Technology for Effective Compliance |
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| Abstract |
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA or SOX) is a landmark legislation passed by the US
Congress to provide effective corporate reforms and restore confidence in the corporate financial
reporting and business practices. The act makes senior management and CFOs directly
accountable for the accuracy and integrity of financial reporting and also mandates an effective
assessment of Disclosure and Internal Controls.
In addition, the Act is likely to spur additional regulations resulting from the specific and extensive
rule making and studies required by the Act from various U.S. agencies like the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC), NYSE etc. Organizations will need to incur considerable efforts for
effective compliance.
Although signed into law almost 18 months ago, the Act continues to draw wide attention from
corporate. Yet relatively little attention has been focused on the role of Information Technology (IT)
in the compliance process. This is unfortunate since the accuracy and timeliness of financial
reporting is, at most companies (especially at large organizations), heavily dependent on a wellcontrolled
IT environment. CIO's and their IT organizations need to be closely involved with the
Finance Department in Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance activities.
Most organizations will already have some of the necessary technology building blocks in place for
SOX Compliance. What enterprises today need is a holistic SOX Compliance Solution Architecture
Framework leveraging existing and new technologies, which can reduce costs and increase flexibility
for compliance efforts.
This white paper discusses a top-down SOX Compliance Architecture
Framework that ensures an organization-wide SOX-compliance.
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