SAS® for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
Shorter quarterly reporting deadlines. Stiffer penalties for noncompliance. Faster disclosure of material events. The litany of requirements dictated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is familiar by now, but compliance is still a challenge.
SAS can help companies overcome the most common challenges associated with achieving Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
Information silos
When organizations evaluate current processes as required by Sarbanes-Oxley, they quickly realize that information is in independent silos throughout the organization. These information silos minimize transparency and diminish information integrity by preventing you from achieving a consistent corporate perspective of financial data.
With SAS Data Integration, you can integrate information silos and create a complete audit trail describing how information is created, moved and changed in your organization. SAS Data Integration also improves information credibility through proven data cleansing methods.
Disparate financial systems
Given the prevalence of mergers and acquisitions in today’s market, many organizations
wind up with multiple financial consolidation and reporting systems. This situation
can create delays in generating a credible corporate view of financials. Consolidating
disparate financial systems transparently is a challenge as well. SAS
Financial Management increases transparency and decreases the time to generate
enterprise financial reports.
Lack of process-level cost information
Sarbanes-Oxley requires organizations to document all financial processes. But since it does not specify that process costs should be calculated, organizations rely on financial systems to determine the cost impact of a material event. Financial accounting is not easily understood throughout the organization, however, and is usually aggregated at too high a level. As a result, managers cannot identify the “cost implications” of specific activities or processes. Without the ability to see cost implications, managers may be blind to a material event. SAS
Activity-Based Management enables organizations to calculate process-level costs.
Human capital risks
Many organizations are not certain that they employ the right people in the right jobs. A lack of understanding about whether employees have the appropriate education, training and skills for certain jobs poses an operational risk. SAS
Human Capital Management helps organizations understand and track employees’ education, training and skills related to positions and requirements. With SAS Human Capital Management, organizations can also improve succession planning efforts by identifying employees at risk of leaving the company.
Ineffective communications
Sarbanes-Oxley raises the bar for organizational communications and transparency.
Organizations often find it challenging to create a clear and concise view of
their current position and where they’re headed. Even more difficult is sifting
through the reams of information to determine potential dangers.
SAS Strategic Performance Management enables
organizations to pull together critical performance indicators that report current
health while alerting you to future dangers and opportunities. SAS Strategic
Performance Management also documents how employees affect processes…how processes
affect customers… and how customers affect financials. Such cause and effect
information empowers organizations to see problems and events early enough to
take action.
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Activity-Based Management
