Situation:

Signed into law on July 30, 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) represents one of the biggest changes to federal securities laws in history. Resulting from the large corporate financial scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Arthur Andersen, provisions of SOX detail criminal and civil penalties for noncompliance, certification of internal auditing and increased financial disclosure. It affects U.S.-based public companies and International companies with a U.S. presence.

Section 301 of the Act specifically requires publicly traded companies to establish procedures for the confidential and anonymous submission of concerns regarding accounting or auditing matters. Companies must employ an anonymous reporting mechanism (commonly a hotline and/or Web submission site) that allows employees and other stakeholders to report misconduct, fraud, incidents and other concerns without fear of retribution. To be effective, this reporting mechanism should operate independent of management . Moreover, it is important for companies to effectively monitor and document follow-up action on such reports. Since it is mandated that internal controls must be continually monitored and reported to board members and senior management, organizations should further have a method to conduct real-time queries and analyses of data collected from their reporting systems.

Solution:

Global Compliance™ offers 24-hour, round-the-clock anonymous telephony or Web reporting of fraud, business misconduct and non-compliance to help companies meet the requirements of Section 301 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We enable reports to be submitted to a fully independent, third party provider to ensure confidentiality and anonymity while providing interpretation in up to 150 languages in order to support the needs of all employees in their native languages around the world.

Global Compliance also enables real-time, online access to a centralized data repository to efficiently manage allegation reports. Our case investigation management system facilitates case assignment, investigative notes, communication between case managers and case investigators, attachment of documentation and designation of case status to allow proper investigations. In order to enable organizations to identify trends and conduct statistical analyses of program activity, we provide a flexible information management tool that supports data mining to generate reports for board members and senior management.

Outcome: