Nearly Half May Not Make Second Sarbanes-Oxley Deadline

Nearly half of all companies affected by the second round of Sarbanes-Oxley deadlines do not expect to meet the July 2006 target, according to a poll of IT executives facing the deadline.

Forty-five percent of U.S. IT executives responding to the survey by instant messaging security vendor Akonix Systems Inc. said their companies were unprepared to meet the message retention requirements in the federal regulations governing corporate information.

Twenty-nine percent of the 157 respondents to the August poll said they felt they would be able to meet the deadline for archiving messages, while a further 26 percent said they did not know.

Those companies were granted an extension beyond the laws original Nov. 15, 2004, deadline and have until July 15, 2006, to comply with the message retention aspects.

"Its alarming that almost half of the companies in our survey anticipate they will fail to meet the message retention requirements set forth in the next years SOX deadline, even with 10 months still remaining to get their systems in place," Francis Costello, chief technology officer at Akonix, said in a release Monday. "Many popular software applications arent equipped with features for enforcing compliance, which leads some organizations to neglect or ignore their own policies."

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