Sarbanes-Oxley is regarded as one of most important pieces of legislation affecting corporate governance, financial disclosure and the practice of public accounting to the US and those companies that are US owned. The Act came into force in 2002, and is best known for its requirement that the chief executive and chief financial officers of an organisation are personally responsible for certifying financial results. In order to have this confidence, processes and procedures are adopted both within the financial environment and other environments such as I.T. that could impinge on accounting accuracy and integrity.
Hearst, being privately owned, do not have a need to be governed by the law but recognise the huge value in having the procudural network that brings with it stable and corporate responsibility. Many of the companies within the group have adopted the processes which ultimately are verifed by independent auditors. CDS Global has been one of those companies and started it’s path to compliance some two years ago. The procedures and risk assessments are rigorous and continuous and by means of a web based central repository are authenicated and verified by the Hearst Service Centre in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.
In 2005, CDS Global in the U.K. received its first visit from Hearst internal auditors to further verify and test many of the key financial processes. Senior management at Hearst were fully reported on the progress of the audit and CDS Global were able to demonstrate its compliance. For all companies under the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, achieving satisfactory results at a first showing are not enough to see compliance. The testing carried out annually covers both past and present and looks for improvements and adaption of new business practices. The Sarbanes legislation in the future will no doubt become ingrained as part of the Englaish law. CDS Global is already set up for this eventuality. |
