Overview of Sarbanes-Oxley

Spurzem (2009) states that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (often shortened to SOX) is legislation enacted in response to the high-profile Enron and WorldCom financial scandals to protect shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and fraudulent practices in the enterprise. The act is administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which sets deadlines for compliance and publishes rules on requirements. Sarbanes-Oxley is not a set of business practices and does not specify how a business should store records; rather, it defines which records are to be stored and for how long.
The legislation not only affects the financial side of corporations, it also affects the IT departments whose job it is to store a corporation's electronic records. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for "not less than five years." The consequences for non-compliance are fines, imprisonment, or both. IT departments are increasingly faced with the challenge of creating and maintaining a corporate records archive in a cost-effective fashion that satisfies the requirements put forth by the legislation.

Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley

In consequence, Search Financial Security (2009) shows the Section 404 of SOX mandates that all publicly traded companies must establish internal controls and procedures for financial reporting and must document, test and maintain those controls and procedures to ensure their effectiveness. The purpose of SOX is to reduce the possibilities of corporate fraud by increasing the stringency of procedures and requirements for financial reporting.

These reports require to be conveyed annually of the public company by management on the internal control over financial reporting within the organization. McGladrey & Pullen