Most companies in year three of their SOX compliance efforts are moving towards sustainable compliance. So what comprises sustainable compliance. In recent conferences and seminars I have attended the word "Sustainable SOX Compliance" is the buzzword. Lets not get into technical jargon maze. I have been asking people mainly, SOX directors, SOX project managers, SOX testers, and SOX IT auditors what according to them is sustainable Sarbanes Oxley Compliance. Here is a summary of the responses that I received.

1. Preventive - Compliance in order to be sustainable need to focus on preventive controls rather than detective controls. After the fact controls remediation is not a good sign of sustainability.

2. Automated - Sustainable Sarbanes Oxley compliance aims at automating controls. Doing away with cumbersome and unreliable manual controls has become the norm. In a way it can be said that the more a company is automated and tech savvy, it can reach the sustainablity goal earlier.

3. Cross Enterprise - Compliance for SOX is for the entire company. If different sister companies are on different platforms, ERPs etc, it becomes difficult to manage compliance. Point solutions lead to different test plans for different softwares. Conslidation is the key. It is always better that the entire enterprise is on one single solution such as SAP, Oracle Applications, JD Edwards etc.

4. Lower Cost - Going forward, companies should aim for lowering their SOX compliance costs. The more costly the complaince, chances are companies might not be able to sustain compliance. Costs will definetly
be involved for SOX compliance, but the overall motive should be to lower costs.

5. Process Improvement and Efficiency - All the persons that I talked to had one common thing to say, sustainable SOX complaince has to include process improvements. As we go along the compliance route, we can leverage sustainability only when process efficiencies and improvements are brought in, of course with proper controls built within processes.

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