Friday, October 14, 2005

A process of improvement: Sarbox is never simple, but it can be less complex


How many processes does your company have? A simple question if your firm has documented them all as part of meeting Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. But ensuring actual compliance? That's another matter.

So who's going to help minimise the time the nasty auditors spend going through all those processes? You guessed it. Business software companies can help you meet your compliance needs, they plead.

This time, though, they have a point. PricewaterhouseCoopers' Anton Ruddenklau revealed that one US company he worked with on Sarbox documented 88,000 processes. As he pointed out, it takes an auditor around five hours of billable time to test each one.

So what can technology do to help ease this pain? Firstly, many processes can be automated. The more the degree of automation, the quicker that processes can be checked and the stronger the process will appear to the auditor.

See full Article.