Big4Guy

Most consulting firms in the Sarbanes Oxley compliance busines, stress on process driven sarbanes oxley compliance to clients. Though most companies are now in years 3 and 4 of their SOX complaince, some are still grappling with compliance issues. Before I explain what process driven SOX compliance is, let me touch upon a few important issues. Any regulatoty compliance needs to be sponsored by the senior management. If you are interested, here is a post I did about who should be the SOX sponsor. Moving on to the tpoic of my discussion today, process driven Sarbanes Oxley compliance. There are three main things which contribute to process driven SOX compliance.

1. Clear Onwership and Responsibilities - SOX requires clear ownership by process owners of their responsibilities. It is the process owners who are finally responsible for compliance. The more they are aware of their responsibilities, the more better the overall compliance is.

2. Addressing the control environment - Process driven SOX compliance should address a company's control environment. Many companies start out strong but somehow streer away from the main objective. Successful compliance is one which focuses on the overall controls compliance.

3. Process improvement and productivity - Finally, all SOX projects need to look at overall process imporvement. This includes integrated ERP, process re-engineering and other process improvement stuff. Insight and learnings from the first couple of years of compliance should be used to improve processes and make SOX compliance easier.

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