Project Management

SOX 101

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

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To put it mildly, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) has caused quite a stir in Corporate America and throughout the world. A simple Google search on the phrase "Sarbanes-Oxley" returns more than 3.5 million hits; more than enough to make a person's head ache.
The Act focuses primarily on financial controls and disclosure, but in so doing has a major impact on the internal controls surrounding underlying information technologies. The real question at hand is, what is that impact and who does it really affect? This article provides a quick overview of SOX with specific emphasis on how it relates to IT.
Basically the goal of SOX is to improve the quality of disclosures made by publicly held companies on their financial condition and to protect investors by creating a set of regulations and compliance governance boards. SOX holds the CEO and CFO personally accountable for the representations concerning their company's financial condition.
In doing so, SOX focuses on security and internal controls of an organization and thus has a huge impact on IT systems and organizations. In short, for IT it's about exercising appropriate levels of control, security and disciplines over information, technology infrastructures and IT services
While the SOX has 11 sections or "titles", the ones that focus most on compliance are 302, 404, 409 and 802 are summarized below:
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