Posts Tagged ‘SOX 404’
An Update on SOX Compliance Issues
The season for Sarbanes-Oxley audits is now mostly behind us, which means we’re moving into the season of webinars about this year’s SOX audits and lessons we can learn for future years. I attended one such webinar this week and am here to pass along my notes. The webinar itself was run by audit firm…
Read MoreAnother Example of Spreadsheet Risk
We missed this until now, but a Radical Compliance fan passed along this item for all you internal accounting control enthusiasts: a water development business in Colorado that recently had to correct its financial statements because of sloppy spreadsheet controls. The company in question is Pure Cycle Corp. ($PYCO), which sells water and wastewater services…
Read MoreOn Booting Chinese Firms Off U.S. Exchanges
Amid the many executive orders and memoranda President Trump has ballyhooed lately, let’s not forget this sneaky little number: a proposal that Chinese businesses listed on U.S. stock exchanges must submit to U.S. auditing standards. Right now, Chinese firms don’t have to do that. Rather, they can publish financial statements audited by Chinese audit firms;…
Read MoreSEC to Vote on 404(b) Exemptions
Well, here we go: the Securities and Exchange Commission will vote next week on a proposal to exempt companies with less than $100 million in annual revenue from audits of their internal control over financial reporting. The meeting will happen on March 11, and so far the internal control exemption is the only item on…
Read MoreMore on SOX 404(b) Compliance
SEC officials dropped a few more hints this week about their thinking on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, including when we’ll see the agency move to exempt more companies from Section 404(b) of the law — the provision that requires annual audits of a company’s internal control over financial reporting. Said hints came from Bill Hinman, director of…
Read MoreReport: SOX Compliance Still a Pain
Internal auditors might want to look at a new report on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance that paints a rather drab picture of things these days: SOX compliance duties crowding onto your plate, costs going up, and compliance teams adopting new technology at a pace less than people might like. The report, from the SOX Professionals Group and…
Read MoreSOX Compliance: Costs Down, Hours Up
Protiviti has released its annual study of SOX compliance costs — a mixed picture where compliance costs are drifting downward overall, even while the hours spent doing SOX compliance work are on their way up. The report polled nearly 700 finance or audit executives. Frankly, the statistics about SOX compliance costs don’t tell us much,…
Read MoreSEC Preps SOX 404(b) Rollback
The Securities and Exchange Commission will move forward next week with long awaited, but totally not surprising, plans to raise the threshold for accelerated filer status — a move that will pave the way for more companies to avoid outside audits of their internal control over financial reporting. The SEC posted a notice that it…
Read MoreSEC Hits Firms on Internal Control
The Securities and Exchange Commission dinged four companies on Wednesday for poor internal control over financial reporting — a clear warning to companies that simply disclosing a material weakness in ICFR is not sufficient to fulfill a company’s compliance duties. Executives actually have to fix the problem, and not take too long to do so.…
Read MoreRegulatory Reform Bill — Ignores SOX!
The House of Representatives passed a significant regulatory reform legislation Tuesday — and while the bill’s fate in the Senate is unclear, compliance professionals should examine what’s not in the bill. That tells us a lot about how regulatory reform will probably unfold in 2018 and 2019 anyway. The legislation, formally known as the Jobs…
Read More