Features Your Legacy SOX Compliance Tools Are Missing

 Exploring the modern-day critical capabilities that your outdated SOX compliance tools lack


Even though the bulk of the workforce now works remotely, various surveys show that many workday hours are still wasted on needless activities, with some claiming more than 60% of the time every day. Most of these studies attribute it to excessive emails, instant messaging, unnecessary meetings, and monotonous and repetitive tasks every employee must do daily. It is, however, not the case for Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX compliance officers using the legacy SOX compliance tools.


According to a Protiviti report, the hours required for SOX compliance have climbed considerably. The survey states that SOX compliance hours rose for most enterprises, with most companies seeing an increase of 10% or more. This suggests that, while these companies have become used to complying with SOX, the costs and hours necessary have not diminished. According to many executives, the fundamental issue is a lack of a robust SOX compliance tool. Some even indicate the requirement for sophisticated automation, decreased review time, and adjustable criteria, like what we find in today's GDPR or SEC compliance tools.


What is needed in a robust SOX compliance tool?


Advanced Automation

To begin, a modern SOX compliance tool necessitates increased automation. This is because highly regulated organizations must monitor all communications and extensively scrutinize those deemed non-compliant. In this situation, an automated solution would assist compliance managers in monitoring ongoing discussions and quickly spotting non-compliant information using customizable metadata- and content-based rules capabilities offered in most current GDPR compliance systems.


Reduced Review Time

A decrease in review time is another need for the legacy Sarbanes-Oxley compliance tool. Every company deals with massive volumes of data regularly. A robust SOX compliance management software would deal with the data issue by supporting users in analyzing and sampling documents and emails. This would allow users to focus less on data administration and more on compliance management, thus saving time.


Another time-consuming issue is that the data is typically dispersed over numerous sites in silos, such as SharePoint or a file share. An automated compliance solution would provide a comprehensive picture of the data on a single unified platform, eliminating the need to go from one data source to another.


Customizable Criteria

Criteria are another well-known source of concern for SOX compliance officers. It is not easy to keep up with the ever-changing compliance requirements and regulations. Consequently, whether it is the regulatory environment, industry standards, or the company's internal policies, SOX compliance tools must allow users to change rules and policies and review procedures quickly and efficiently as needed.


To summarize, complying with rules and regulations like SOX, FINRA, GDPR, and others has never been simple. And the job of being compliant cannot be wholly taken over by humans or machines either. However, it is possible with the help of an effective compliance team, well-trained staff, and cutting-edge compliance management software.

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