17 years since the law was passed, Sarbanes Oxley continues to feature as a topic on the management agenda. The SOX compliance landscape continues to shift and change affected by new accounting standards, digital transformation and greater pressure for scrutiny from external auditors.

All of this has increased both time spent and cost associated with SOX compliance. Yet the use of automated controls testing and RPA remains low despite the fact that this would increase efficiency and cut costs.

The two most time consuming activities related to SOX are testing for control operating effectiveness, and testing management review controls, but nearly 3 out of 4 organizations are still not using technology tools in the testing of their controls, representing a substantial area for improved efficiency. By reducing the amount of labour intensive, repetitive manual tasks, this leaves greater time and effort to be spent on driving value added activities and genuine risk management.

You can see the full results of the survey that these findings are from, here.

Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.