Still SOX-Bashing After All These Years
Posted on December 16th, 2009 by Katina »Permalink
The Supreme Court’s recent consideration of the constitutionality of the PCAOB has got a lot of people talking, and our old friend Francine McKenna has an interesting (and characteristically spirited, slightly salty) take at GoingConcern on what the oft-maligned SOX legislation has actually done, for better or worse, in the Audit world.
If anyone had been under the impression that SOX had fixed corporate accounting for good, the past fifteen months have almost certainly corrected that assumption. That said, we at Approva see plenty of benefits in the focus since SOX’s passage on identifying controls and monitoring them – ideally, through automation and a continuous monitoring process. In addition to easing compliance burdens, there are real business benefits to keeping close track of potential problem areas like user access and SoD – and getting better, real-time visibility into functions like Accounts Payable and monitoring the general ledger can increase efficiency, reduce risks of fraud, and make for a far stronger bottom line.
We’ll be interested to see the Court rules in 2010 on just what the future of the PCAOB looks like, but in the mean time we’ll keep working as we have been to help companies examine their business processes in order to reduce risk and improve operational efficiency. Because knowing what’s going on in your business at every level makes sense for reasons far beyond compliance.
March 21st, 2010 at 11:19 am
[...] the word about the importance of audit, compliance and controls monitoring. Approva’s Audit Trail blog was one of the first to link to re: The Auditors and put this site on a “blog roll”. So [...]
March 30th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
[...] on a more personal note, by now it should be clear that we love our readers almost as much as we love a good audit. And faithful readers will remember that we also love Francine McKenna over at re: The [...]
June 23rd, 2010 at 9:27 am
[...] exercise has been worth to businesses. Kind of surprisingly (if you read as much SOX-bashing as we do), it sounds like folks are beginning to appreciate the silver lining in that big old SOX [...]