Sarbanes-Oxley Ongoing Compliance Guide: Key Processes and Summary Checklists

4. Addressing Compliance Challenges through Automation

Organizations invested millions of dollars in initial compliance, and subsequently spent as much as 80 percent of those same dollars in year two refining documentation, testing, and remediating control weaknesses. Now, as they move through year three and beyond, companies are exploring automation as a means for making the ongoing compliance process more efficient and less costly.

As a result of several factors, not the least of which being a lack of integrated testing as well as a significant amount of manual compliance testing and reporting, external audit costs have also increased—in many cases, significantly. Lack of automation has also contributed to the high cost of compliance. In many organizations, a high number of manual controls still remain, and a substantial amount of manual testing continues to occur.

Compliance monitoring, testing, and reporting automation can play a key role in achieving process improvement and efficiency. When implemented effectively, technology enables an efficient, repeatable, and reliable process that can significantly lower the cost of compliance and offer increased visibility into the business. It can also strengthen the control environment, increase data integrity, improve process efficiency, and minimize risk by providing better visibility into control issues, allowing organizations to address known concerns earlier and avoid misstatements or certification issues.

The reasons most often ...