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Atos Consulting shares event analysis on how to cut Sarbanes-Oxley costs by 50% and launches Compliance Benchmarking Club

Atos Consulting shares Sarbanes-Oxley event analysis and launches Compliance Benchmarking Club

Atos Consulting hosted a Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) breakfast forum this week, bringing together senior executives from a number of leading financial institutions in the UK to discuss how companies can turn SOX from an expensive, project-based overhead into a cost efficient, sustainable, annual programme. Key areas covered included:

1. Involvement of Audit in SOX projects: is there likely to be a reduction in Audit fees as a result of external Auditor’s involvement in supporting SOX projects?
2. The importance of establishing a structure for key controls around business processes: this makes it easier to communicate SOX both to senior management and to staff, while making it easier to focus, categorise, assess and test. This will also support increased cost effectiveness of ongoing SOX reporting.
3. The use of a recognised framework for general IT controls: integrating these into internal IT standards and existing policies made it easier to “sell” SOX compliance to the IT community and improves efficiency of testing.
4. User Access Rights / Segregation of Duties violations: through SOX, this has been highlighted as a key area for concern. Many banks are taking the opportunity to streamline their joiner/leaver process, minimise generic system IDs and automate violations alerts.
5. Outsourcing: for reasons based predominantly on cost, some institutions are considering outsourcing their testing.
6. SOX sustainability: the key to embedding SOX into business as usual is to get the business to take ownership; and ensure that they, rather than the SOX central team, take on responsibility for testing controls going forward. In addition, by transitioning away from external resources, SOX moves out of “project” mode and is more likely to be perceived as a business as usual issue.
7. Cultural shift: Acceptance of the improvement of controls achieved through SOX as a “value-add” from an internal, as well as a regulatory, perspective is key to ongoing sustainability.

Atos Consulting announced the launch of its "Compliance Benchmarking Club" at the event. Participants in the "SOX sustainability and benchmarking" survey (see banner and link to survey) will be invited to join the Benchmarking Club and have the opportunity to compare their compliance-related progress with that of their peers. The Benchmarking Club will host 'focus groups' and periodic workshops. 

The compliance team at Atos Consulting is available to talk through the discussion points from the SOX meeting in more depth and to explain more about the Atos Consulting Compliance Benchmarking Club. Please contact:

Caroline Crouch
Atos Origin
Tel: +44 20 7830 4233
Email: caroline.crouch@atosorigin.com