I agree with the basic premise of your Oct. 9 editorial that [the Sarbanes-Oxley Act] has forced companies to re-examine their procedures and associated control structures [ “Our View: SarbOx Is Worth Saving,”or “Fix, Dont Dump, SarbOx”].
The benefits that we gained from the review and implementation of COBIT [Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology]-based IT procedures and controls was vastly outweighed by the cost and amount of support we had to provide to external auditors and to our own audit firm.
Hard dollars spent on compliance hide a much bigger investment in effort by scarce and key internal IT resources to teach outsiders how we conduct our business and to satisfy audit firms demands for compliance with “one size fits all” audit programs.
Albert J. Bolet
EMS Technologies
Efficiency is error detection and avoidance. You do not get credit for correcting errors you make but for avoiding errors and the resulting economic consequences. When these consequences are discovered, they must be documented in standardized format to prevent future failures.
Jim Cummings
Data-Centric Coding Approach