J-SOX Compliance Date Nears
Publicly-traded companies in America have been through a couple rounds of SOX audits, but companies in other parts of the world will be getting their first taste of similar compliance requirements in the next year.
J-SOX, the Sarbanes-Oxley-inspired name for the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law, will go into effect in April 2008 for approximately 3,800 companies listed in Japan, along with their foreign subsidiaries. Like SOX, the Japanese regulation was also enacted in response to accounting scandals involving companies like Seibu Railway Co., Livedoor Co., and the Murakami Fund.
According to an article by Thomas Hoffman, some companies are already being proactive. Fuji’s largest North American subsidiary is documenting its hardware, their IP addresses, and the software running on them. In addition, they are documenting the controls it has in place for several IT processes that could affect the company’s financials. Tokyo Electron America, Inc., based in Austin, TX, is tracking and monitoring their global IT systems and documenting the security safeguards they have in place for each system.
If there is any lesson Japanese firms can learn from the first two years of SOX, it is to not procrastinate, particularly with getting the people, processes, and technology in place that will weave compliance into the overall fabric of daily activity in the IT department. Otherwise, it becomes an almost total interruption to the IT department’s responsibility to overall business services.
Sounds like some American subsidiaries may be heeding the lessons learned from other American companies and passing it on to their Japanese counterparts…and that’s a good thing.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from IT Best Practices and Compliance Reporting Information authored by abakman. Read the original post at: https://www.bakmansblog.com/2007/04/jsox_compliance.html