SOX Compliance, as many would be aware, is the terminology used to refer to the compliance of law according to The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It is a legislation, which provides protection to investors from accounting frauds, especially in case of the shares sold by publicly traded companies. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is considered as a solid step towards ensuring investor safety through strict reforms in the field of corporate financial declarations. The act applies to all US public companies as well as non-US companies having presence in the US. It is all about corporate governance and financial disclosure.

Since SOX compliance has been made mandatory, there has been a great demand for SOX training facilities. Since this is a specialized area of operation, every organization has now started investing a part of their resources on SOX training so that the organization remains SOX compliant and thereby enjoy greater investor trust.

The provisions listed out in the SOX Compliance process are many and they call for criminal and civil penalties for non-compliance. Hence, functions like internal audit certification, increased financial disclosure and the like has become critical for the organization.

The SOX compliance requirements states that all financial reports should include the Internal Controls Report and the Year-end of Financial disclosure Reports. These requirements ensure that the financial data of the company is precise and there are necessary checkpoints to safeguard the financial data. This shows that a company’s financial data is accurate and that there are adequate control measures in place to safeguard financial data. A SOX auditor will review the controls, policies, and procedures during a Section 404 audit.

SOX compliance training is one of the prerequisites for organizational compliance as far as SOX Act is considered. Many institutes offer SOX Compliance training and certifications. The SOX Certification is offered based on one’s knowledge of and experience with SOX. The SOX legislation, though mainly aimed to protect the investors, not only deals with the financial side of corporations, but also affects the IT department, which does the job of record keeping. As per SOX Act, these records should be stored for a minimum period of five years and non-compliance will attract fines, imprisonment, or both.

SOX regulations came into effect when some huge accounting scandals came into the limelight at the start of the new millennium. Hence, SOX compliance also focuses on the maintenance of audit trails (log files and work-papers) of any electronic data that contain, relate to, or mention financial data. The regulations specify that these work-papers and electronic audit trails should not be destroyed, altered or falsified in any manner and should be retained for a minimum period of five years.