How To Implement SOX ITGC?

Implementing Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Information Technology General Controls (ITGC) is crucial for any publicly traded corporation in the United States. In reaction to corporate crises, SOX compliance aims to reassure investors by guaranteeing the dependability and correctness of financial reporting. Organizations must implement strong internal controls in this area since the ITGC component of SOX focuses on the key IT systems that support financial data.

Whether you are an IT manager, a compliance officer, or a CIO, you need a roadmap to navigate the complexities of SOX ITGC compliance that provides insights and strategies to help you establish effective controls, safeguard financial integrity, and instill confidence in your organization’s financial reporting. This blog will discuss the appropriate steps and guidelines for putting SOX ITGC compliance into effect. We will explore the nuances of documentation, testing, implementation, and control design and stress the significance of continuous observation and the function of outside audits in verifying adherence.

How To Implement SOX ITGC Compliance?

If you want an overview of SOX ITGC compliance and want to learn more about the basics of internal controls and compliance requirements, you can check out this article here.

Now, let’s dive into the five-step framework for implementing SOX ITGC at your organization:

1. Establishing a Controls Environment

There is more to the term “controls environment” than just the data or IT environments. Your organization’s values, culture, and expectations are also part of your controlling environment.

How can a positive control environment be created and maintained?

• Determine your goal: This should cover strategic planning and ITGC goals so that everyone involved knows exactly what has to be done.
• Promote the goal from the top down: Senior management needs to take on the role of ITGC champions, upholding and advancing the moral principles, integrity, and rules that permeate teams.
• Hire for compliance: You should interview candidates to ensure they understand SOX and ITGC compliance; gaps can always be remedied. This is a part of your HR and hiring process.
• Provide leadership and governance: Assure leaders are abreast of ITGC operations and performance factors, addressing any found control issues.
• Encourage accountability by integrating ITGC standards into performance reviews and framing SOX and ITGC compliance as integral to people’s daily jobs rather than as something apart from them.

In the end, ITGC is about optimizing company performance and cost-efficiency; thus, maintaining a solid controls environment as part of an integrated culture of compliance scrutiny will deliver far more benefits than SOX compliance readiness.

2. Conducting an ITGC Risk Assessment

The conventional approach to risk management has primarily concentrated on potential financial risks. However, the focus of enterprise risk management (ERM) has recently evolved to a risk assessment standard that considers everything that potentially impacts the organization. This holistic way of thinking should guide your design and implementation of ITGC for SOX compliance.

• Link risks to performance: Every control owner needs to be able to recognize the risks that could have an adverse effect on operations and performance.
• Work together to assess risks: Gather with ITGC stakeholders to determine possible external risks, including gaps in leadership, HR issues related to poor hiring and training practices, possibly disregarded or unresolved audit and monitoring findings, new laws and regulations, and inadequate physical asset safeguards.
• Rank and rate of risks identified: Prioritize addressing significant risks and work with ITGC partners to develop plans for mitigating less urgent risks.
• Create corrective measures: Assign precisely specified actions to designated control owners responsible for carrying out control standards within their purview.

3. Implementing Control Activities

The outcome of your ITGC risk assessment ought to have been a thorough framework for putting into practice strict ITGC standards that don’t leave anything up to chance. Your control activity implementations should now strive to put that structure into practice.

• Define clear roles: Assign a single person to handle each important ITGC task and ensure hierarchies and structures are in place to facilitate efficient reporting and delegation.
• Use the division of duties principle: Refrain from assigning all responsibility for any particular procedure to a single stakeholder. Diversify process ownership across personnel instead, and when separation of roles isn’t feasible, apply compensatory controls like extra monitoring or secondary sign-offs.
• Limit access: Unless a solid “need-to-know” reason has been found and approved, do not grant systems or data access rights.
• Establish guidelines and processes: These should be written instructions with clear guidelines on how to follow them.
• Maintain precise records: Keep track of all expenses and their justifications. This will be a great help for documentation later.

As part of controls efforts intended to leave a clear audit trail of transparency and accountability, all project expenditures in your company or organization should be supported by a clear statement of purpose and objectives.

4. Implementing Information and Communication Systems

Your ITGC rules for SOX compliance need to have taken shape by this stage. 

It is, therefore, essential that ITGC be upheld hereafter, with the support of high-quality data and the distribution of efficient communication, to guarantee that standards stay high and well-maintained.

• Provide dependable information systems: Information systems monitoring ITGC operations’ status must be accessible and secure. Spreadsheets shouldn’t be left lying around on desktop computers, for instance.
• Share information about ITGC with everyone in your company: Make sure the appropriate compliance stakeholders receive vital information on time and find out what information they could be missing.

5. Monitoring Your ITGC Controls

You may think the hard work is over, but like every compliance standard that requires continuous monitoring, so does SOX ITGC.  

• Conduct ITGC performance reviews: These reviews should determine whether controls are being followed by comparing your actual performance to your budgeted and set targets.

• Perform evaluations of management independently: Test your ITGC even more with the assistance of unbiased management stakeholders who can provide an impartial opinion on whether controls are functioning as intended or if they need to be modified.

• Set up outside audits and address results: A subset of IC that deals with the integrity of your IT environment and data systems is your IT General Controls (ITGC). Enlist the assistance of external auditors to review these controls.

• Keep track of all corrective measures: If any control gaps are found, close them and provide documentation of your efforts. Verify if the remedial measures were adequate to complete the identified control gaps.

• Keep an ongoing eye on your ITGC: SOX compliance is part of an ongoing ITGC standards monitoring process. To ensure that standards are being upheld and enhanced, you will thus need to devise efficient techniques of tying corrective actions back to enhancements in your Controls Environment and Control Activity standards.

Now that you know how to implement the guidelines of SOX ITGC, let’s check out some best practices that may help you along the way.

Best Practices To Implement SOX ITGC

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when implementing ITGCs in a fashion that complies with SOX regulations:

1. Focus Auditing on Manual Controls First

The dependability needed for the data and the system’s transaction processing capacity typically define an IT system’s scope. 

On the other hand, whenever a manual control that depends on IT systems is implemented, the control owner must manually reconcile the data to ensure that it is accurate. Alternatively, the correctness and completeness of the data can be sufficiently covered by hand-adjusting the data. The management must determine if general IT controls are necessary for the test.

2. Employ a Consistent Testing Process

Instead of testing a different sample for each process in each department, it is advised that you use a similar test procedure if the processes in several business units are the same. 

A proportional sample can be applied to all five business units, for instance, if Purchase to Pay is used in each of the five business units and the controls are the same. Alternatively, you can use a proportional sampling technique that considers the relative amount of changes in each system to determine the sample size if all systems use the same change management procedure.

3. Establish a Baseline for Automated Measurements

Strong change management controls and a uniform configuration are features of some automated controls deployed as core parts of an IT system. 

Since there is little chance of problems with this kind of control, you should investigate the potential of setting up a baseline and cutting back on the frequency of audits from once a year to every three years.

4. Make Your Control Set Rational

Controls grow and vary with time, as do corporate activities. When controls are no longer needed, they are frequently not decommissioned in a timely manner. 

Controls were developed in response to a particular issue or scenario that an external auditor brought to light. Managers ought to thoroughly analyze the controls following the audit to determine and assess which measures are suitable for their current operations and environment.

5. Prioritize Detective Controls and Consider What Went Wrong

Instead of assessing every preventative and detective control, managers and internal auditors could prefer to concentrate on detective controls. This can improve the detective controls’ testing processes through the cycle.

Rather than focusing on “what went wrong,” detective review controls might aid in error prevention and detection by examining “what might go wrong.” The addition of detective review controls that inquire as to “what went wrong” can simplify the administration and operation of preventative controls and necessitate less testing of these controls.

SOX ITGC Compliance Readiness with Akitra!

Establishing trust is a crucial competitive differentiator when courting new SaaS businesses in today’s era of data breaches and compromised privacy. Customers and partners want assurances that their organizations are doing everything possible to prevent disclosing sensitive data and putting them at risk, and compliance certification fills that need.

Akitra offers an industry-leading, AI-powered Compliance Automation platform for SaaS companies. Using automated evidence collection and continuous monitoring, together with a full suite of customizable policies and controls as a compliance foundation, our compliance automation platform and services help our customers become compliance-ready for SOX ITGC compliance framework, along with other security standards like SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, CCPA, CMMC, and more such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, etc. In addition, companies can use Akitra’s Risk Management product for overall risk management using quantitative methodologies such as Factorial Analysis of Information Risks (FAIR) and qualitative methods, including NIST-based for your company, Vulnerability Assessment and Pen Testing services, Trust Center, and AI-based Automated Questionnaire Response product to streamline and expedite security questionnaire response processes, delivering huge cost savings. Our compliance and security experts will provide customized guidance to navigate the end-to-end compliance process confidently. 

The benefits of our solution include enormous savings in time, human resources, and cost savings, including discounted audit fees with our audit firm partners. Customers achieve compliance certification fast and cost-effectively, stay continuously compliant as they grow, and can become certified under additional frameworks using a single compliance automation platform.

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