The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was approved by Congress in 2002 in response to the scandals at Enron, WordlCom, Tyco and other companies. The Act requires public companies to have an effective system of internal control as attested to by their financial auditor. During the first few years the average cost of compliance was a costly $4.6 million. This has recently dropped to $2.92million, a level which companies still consider excessive.
The cost of compliance caused a great deal of concern for top management of public companies. This led to a great deal of feedback and lobbying for a reduction in the compliance requirements. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and its subsidiary The Public Companies Accounting Board (PCAOB) were put under a great deal of pressure to improve the situation. Their response was two new auditing standards and a set of guidance for top management to use during compliance.
In 2004, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) formed the SOX Community to study ways of providing quality management support for the financial organizations compliance efforts. A SOX Team was charged with leading this effort. When the PCAOB and the SEC published drafts of their documents, Sandy Liebesman, Chairman of the SOX Team, lead the analysis of the publications.
The SOX Team found opportunities in the documents which included the following key practices of the quality and environmental communities:
This session will provide an understanding of the revised documents and will give meaning to the new SEC philosophy of a “top-down, risk-base approach” to compliance. In addition, specific instances where quality management is either specifically stated or implied in the documents will be covered. Attendees at the session will leave with a set of ideas on how quality managers can works with their financial counterparts to improve the SOX compliance process and how they can gain the attention of top management.
Dr. Sandford Liebesman had over 35 years experience in the quality sciences at Bell Laboratories, Bellcore, Lucent Technologies, KEMA Registered Quality and the Kohl Group. He is author of the books TL 9000: A Guide to Measuring Excellence in Telecommunications and Using ISO 9000 to Improve Business Processes.
He is chair elect of the ASQ Electronics and Communications Division and was recently named an ASQ Fellow.
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taught statistics, quality control, quality management and operations research
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Dr. Liebesman has an engineering degree from the