SOX 404 Compliance

While completing their first SOX attestation, one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical outsourcing organizations with operations throughout 43 countries in 56 locations and approximately 6,200 employees, knew that building and maintaining a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance program presented challenges — unearthing and solving the issues that stood in the way of compliance and managing the myriad of spreadsheets and documents that are needed for the task.

In 2005, the Company completed its first year of SOX primarily by performing the tasks in shared services centers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. The Company identified over 1,000 key business controls; remediate and re-tested several hundred key controls and implemented a document control process; tracked remediation; and then tested and re-tested its program.

The company passed the first year of SOX compliance, but at what cost ? Approximately 25,000 internal and external labor hours were needed, and several million dollars were invested.The Company knew it needed to find a better way.