“SOx is a beast”, a client recently told us, and they’re not wrong.
We’ve seen first-hand how many organisations are still struggling to get US SOx right many years after it should have become second nature. The Government’s White Paper, “Restoring trust in audit and corporate governance”, is suggesting that this doesn’t have to be the case in the UK. Hindsight allows us to learn from the US SOx success stories and avoid the mistakes made by those that created a cumbersome and expensive compliance burden with no added value.
Today we have unprecedented change in the regulatory landscape, personal liability for directors in cases of non-compliance, and increasing market expectations around the value of good internal control. Corporate governance reform, including internal control reporting requirements proposed on 18 March 2021 for the UK, has to be a boardroom-level priority which makes having answers to the questions we’re hearing every day – ‘where do we start?’ and ‘how do we maximise benefits?’ – all the more critical.
We have the White Paper, we now know what’s required… so, how do you get started?