Three companies working to meet a rapidly approaching Sarbanes-Oxley deadline show the breadth of systems the act affects and the lengths to which IT managers must go to maintain compliance over time.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, officially known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, has corporations subjecting themselves to a gut-wrenching examination of the way they track and report their financial statements. The act’s first deadline is June 15, when public companies with market capitalizations of $75 million or more must perform a self-assessment of risks for business processes that affect financial reporting. (See Part 1 of this series in last week’s issue and at eWEEK.com.)
Smaller companies, on the other hand, have a compliance deadline of April 15, 2005. All public companies with a fiscal year ending on or after June 15, 2004, must now include a management report on internal controls in their annual report.