Retail Compliance: Financial Controls And Sarbanes-Oxley — A Framework For Automation And Simplification

With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, publicly traded companies in the U.S. must exercise higher levels of oversight over corporate information and the processes used to link this information to financial accounting statements.

New rules promulgated by the European Union, drafted in response to corporate accounting fraud similar to the scandals that roiled the U.S. economy, compound the challenge for multinational businesses.

Virtually all publicly traded companies are affected by one or more of these regulations. The suddenness with which many of these new regulations were enacted has left many businesses scrambling to understand their impact on internal processes. In the United States, most affected businesses have focused on the most striking — and loosely drawn — provisions of the SOX Act, which are briefly described below.