More than three years after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley, members of the business community have shifted their focus toward balancing SOX activities with other business priorities. Internal audit has been one of the areas in which companies have sounded the call for getting back to basics. That’s because internal audit led the Year One 404 compliance effort at most companies, which proved to be a Herculean task—often accomplished at the expense of the function’s other duties.
But while few would argue against the need to take a step back and refocus in Year Two, companies are varied in how they plan to approach the effort to put internal audit back in balance. That’s according to a report released this month by Protiviti, a provider of independent internal audit and business and technology risk consulting services, which found that almost three-quarters of internal audit professionals said rebalancing initiatives at their companies are either underway or in the planning stages.
