Sarbanes-Oxley: The Upside for IT

• States the responsibility of management for establishing and maintaining an adequate internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting; and
• Contains an assessment, as of the end of the issuer's fiscal year, of the effectiveness of the internal control structure and procedures of the issuer for financial reporting.

Though some companies are still doing this without automation, maintaining these controls in a manual fashion is too cumbersome and too apt to result in errors or omissions, says Sanjay Anand, chairman of the SOX Institute, New York.