audit asset management

New Legislation Will Have a Big Impact on Internal Auditing and Asset Management Strategies

By Michael
June 12, 2015

Asset management should be a top priority for those corporate executives and IT managers in charge of preparing their organization for regulatory and litigation reasons. Even if your organization is confident in the current asset management strategy, recent updates to Sarbanes-Oxley are likely to have significant impacts on how companies perform internal auditing and asset management.

Considering the consequences associated with falling short of federal compliance, especially when it comes to the storage and security of sensitive data, it is imperative that companies update their asset management solutions to stay current with the latest guidelines. Review the changes that updates to SOX guidelines will have before an internal audit turns into a serious issue for your company.

Legislation targets insufficient controls of the internal auditing process
Among the changes targeted by updates to SOX are those related to securing the internal controls that companies use to maintain compliance. When SOX was originally introduced in 2002, the assumption of lawmakers was that executives would do their due diligence in ensuring that these controls were prepared to face scrutiny at all times. Unfortunately, things did not progress as planned.

The latest version of the law ups the stakes for executives, who are now personally responsible for ensuring that the company’s strategies for ensuring compliance are up to standard. They may even be found liable if the company’s internal records of assets are found to be inconsistent with the firm’s financial reporting. Such an inconsistency would come with painful consequences for said executive and the company as a whole, emphasizing the importance of taking updates to Sarbanes-Oxley seriously.

Solutions across the board to improve asset management
There are plenty of ways that those in charge of compliance and asset management can tighten up the organization’s internal approach to financial reporting. Financial Executives Reporting Daily recommended that the initial solution should focus on identifying easily solvable errors like when identification tags are misapplied, employees fail to fill out proper documentation or physical inventories are put on the back burner.

Though the challenge of performing this due diligence may go beyond the capacity of your company, it is still critical that asset management be performed with microscopic attention to detail. If employees simply can’t put in the time and energy to finish the project, then it is up to corporate executives to invest in a new approach. This may require them to look outside the company for compliance experts in their field.

Stricter requirements make reaching out for support a prudent choice
There’s a good chance that updates to Sarbanes-Oxley have made cost-effective and streamlined asset management even more difficult than they were before. The new updates may make these appliance struggles even more difficult, a signal that your company may be in need of some outside assistance. Companies saddled down with a large volume of hard disk drives, for example, can rapidly improve the organization of these assets by working with innovative software applications like AssetAware. The ability to streamline organization and eliminate unnecessary steps in the internal auditing process are reasons why the software so special.

Choosing to deploy a flexible solution like AssetAware can improve your business in a number of ways. In addition to enhancing asset management, the program is also capable of adding more visibility to the process and providing insights into how to perform asset management at a larger scale. Both features help to supplement your compliance efforts with added clarity and transparency.

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