SOX Compliance Is Worth the Effort

SOX compliance has helped to make ethics training more common within the corporate environment. According to a 2005 survey by the Ethics Resource Center, 69 percent of employees reported that ethics training in their organizations was up, as compared to 14 percent who said so in the same survey conducted in 2003.

When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was originally passed in 2002, many companies were less than enthusiastic about it. Concerns about the additional accountability and the internal changes that would need to take place weighed heavily on the minds of many company executives.

These concerns turned out to be well founded. Some companies struggled to make the deadlines, and others missed them completely. Reasons included the high cost and enormous effort involved. In some cases, department directives were even changed to focus on meeting compliance.


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