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Sarbanes-Oxley - How is it Affecting You?
Grant Barrett asks: "All I hear from IT directors is Sarbanes-Oxley, Sarbanes-Oxley, Sarbanes-Oxley. SOX, as they're calling it, is taxing manpower, swallowing time, and adding huge administrative headaches--not to mention incurring fees and salaries paid out to staff or third-party firms hired to ensure compliance--and that's just the IT department. How are you dealing? Did you make your compliance deadline even after the extension? Are you joining the the backlash?"
OK, so the collapse of mega-corporations like Enron and Worldcom in accounting scandals cost the people of the country, particular investors, billions of dollars. Enron also defrauded California of billions of dollars.
MORE billions, in fact, than what the attacks on the World Trade Center cost us.
And now, they are saying that the burden of complying with a law that will help to prevent future abuses is too high? Boo Hoo.
I don't think it's too much to ask companies to prove they aren't ripping us off.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There have been few laws passed in the last 3 decades which are designed to help people (investors are often mutual funds and pension funds) at the expense of executive management. Executives for far too long have been able to lie and then claim they didn't know they were lying. Because the SEC doesn't go after white collar crime they way they go after some 16 year old who rips off a 7/11 these guys never go to jail. By creating a paper trail hopefully more executives who commit fraud will go to jail and there will be some decrease in the amount of fraud in US business.
If that's costs money I'm all for seeing the money spent.
I'm posting this anonymously as I wouldn't want it traced back to me, but I can tell you not only is it costly and burdensome, but it doesn't work. We are now in "compliance", but the changes we had to make to our systems not only didn't have any affect on my ability to alter financial data, but they made them less secure in the process, because external auditors know nothing about our systems, they only have a checklist of features that have to be enabled. It's nothing more than a costly joke that wastes my time and keeps me from doing work that would actually improve our systems. I've started avoiding small, quick projects that would benefit the users, because I would spend 5 minutes making the changes and then 2 hours spread over several days documenting them and getting the required approvals to implement them.