IT Compliance Advisor

Feb 3 2009   3:12PM GMT

Corporate reporting: The next information governance frontier?

Posted by: GuyPardon
corporate reporting










If my practice is any gauge, most of them.




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  • DannyLieberman88
    Financial reports (Trial balance, P&L, Income statements, 10K, 10Q etc...) must only be produced by computerized financial management systems, not from Excel. A company that bought SAP or Oracle Applications should ask for their money back with penalties if they can't do this elementary task - that is the must fundamental business requirement in the world - produce reports from the accounting system. A company that produces all of it's financial reports directly from it's ERP/finance/accounting systems will be 95% of the way to complying with corporate governance regulation. The US and the world need less regulation not more. We need to simplify the way a business runs. SOX 404 is an incredibly simple requirement - "thou shall not fake your financial reports in Excel". I hear estimates that on the order of 1% of the US GDP of 14 Trillion dollars is spent on compliance service providers. Take the regulation away and you have 100BN dollars to spend on more productive things. Now with the Obama (and previous Bush) federal bailout programs for the heavily regulated financial services industry - the US is planning to spend up to 10% of the US GDP on regulation. I don't get it. Danny Lieberman [A href=""]Software Associates[/A]
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  • Hiskid
    I work at a Fortune 500 company which adhers to SOX. What a burden the government is placing on companies! I now spend 60% of my time doing documentation of the IT tasks I perform. You think I'm kidding, I thought it was an exaggeration until I had to do it! To call in a firefight to make a data change and document that change usually now takes at least a half an hour, as opposed to the 20 seconds it used to take. This is because you must provide all kinds of information about your data change - why you did it, the ticket# of the user's request, the color of your underwear on the day you changed, etc.It doesn't look like it's going to get any better - government is working to include more and more companies under the SOX umbrella to access company information. And if they hold the purse strings due to a bailout, Big Brother is here! Be that as it may, my recommendation is that companies do proactive research as to what it would take for them to be SOX complliant, research to see just how much their current system can meet those requirements. Then, I would highly recommend that your company be poised to provide itself a solution to this requirement capable of being implemented on a moment's notice, so it doesn't suffer any penalties or encounter any unexpected surprises. And don't be penny wise and pound foolish. If you have to buy or develop software which expedites documentation, DO IT! You will need to streamline the process as much as possible as you incorporate into your techies' work loads. If you don't, you will be sorry you didn't, as your IT department suddenly experiences the gridlock they have daily in Washington DC. Techies, the most painless way is to build your documentation as you go - when you are on a screen performing a task, take a print screen of it and put it in your document. Hardware people, buy memory-LOTS! I am not happy about all this any more than anyone else (it makes me hurl), but unless and until George Washington shows up again to set this country straight, that is what it is going to take to get the job done.
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