Sarbanes-Oxley Costs Stil High
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Two surveys have found that compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is not going to be cheaper this year. Automation of testing, one of the most hyped product areas of last year has failed to reduce the effort. A Milwaukee law firm Foley and Lardner found massive increases in audit fees in 2004. They attribute the increase to costs associated with SOX compliance. Particularly hard hit were small- and medium-sized companies. Section 404 was singled out by Foley and Lardner as the largest expense. The lawyers point out that many companies "still have a lot of heavy lifting to do in the future as they try to streamline operations." Automation is at the centre of the second survey. US public companies have not taken the chance to reduce the costs of complying with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The finding is from a survey into compliance plans for the second year of the act. The survey was from software manufacturer, ACL Services. Co-incidentally ACL produce continous controls monitoring solutions. Section 404 testing is likely to suffer the same shortfalls as last year:- understaffed and overworked. The process will still be the same with huge amounts of testing and/or remediation of manual controls. ACL commented that internal auditors tended to be very supportive of moves towards automation. Companies though tended not to back them up.
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