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Compliance: Sarbanes-Oxley's Grip on Internal Audits Loosens
Internal audit departments have hyper-focused on Sarbanes-Oxley since the legislation went into effect in 2002. The initial confusion around exactly what Sarbanes-Oxley entailed meant that many risk-adverse companies overdid efforts to ensure that they were within compliance. It hasn’t been until the SEC offered more specific guidance around Sarbanes-Oxley in 2007 and the PCAOB provided clarification in their 2007 Auditing Standard No. 5 that companies are feeling they have a better grip around what is required.
Those clarifications are now allowing internal audit departments a chance to finally look beyond Sarbanes-Oxley into other areas that they’ve traditionally have been involved but which have been placed on hold over the past few years. Some are referring to the change in focus as a “rebalancing strategy”.
Audit departments identified the following areas as focus areas when answering a survey by Protiviti:
- Nearly 75 percent of the organizations reported that they have moved beyond rebalancing
- Most audits groups are rebalancing without changes of resources. Just 20 percent of organizations are adding resources.
- “Internal audit being able to perform more traditional audits” and “more appropriate coverage of risk” rank as the top two areas for rebalancing
Of the more than 600 respondents in the survey, 60 percent were in or beyond their fourth year of complaince.
