Remote work amidst COVID-19 environment further drives vital need for automation and technology adoption for compliance processes
The eleventh annual Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance Survey, conducted by global consulting firm Protiviti, identified that only 46 percent of audit teams have been utilizing advanced technologies to optimize compliance processes, a decrease from the previous year’s survey findings. The longstanding challenges associated with compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, such as the cost of compliance and reliance on time-consuming manual tasks, are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as finance and audit teams are required to perform audit tasks remotely.
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“The tasks associated with SOX compliance continue to be significant and time-consuming,” said Brian Christensen, executive vice president and global leader of Protiviti’s internal audit and financial advisory practice. “The pandemic brings added burdens to the SOX compliance process, and it will be important for companies to reassess any temporary changes in control design and operation to ensure they continue to be aligned with their risk appetite as the business environment begins to normalize.”
The new survey revealed that the number of hours devoted to the SOX compliance process continues to rise, despite regulatory requirements remaining the same year-on-year. Among companies that saw an increase in their SOX compliance hours, 67 percent reported the number of hours went up by more than 10 percent over the prior year, highlighting their lack of automation for simple functions. This finding can also be attributed to the increasingly more complex operations of modern companies. Yet SOX teams that rely solely on spreadsheet and word processing applications, or legacy GRC (governance, risk and compliance) systems to manage their control environments, spend extensive time dealing with version control issues, manually making individual control changes across a dozen or so documents and preparing status reports.
