How to Get SOX Compliant With SAP Audit Compliance Solutions?
Segregation of Duties is the separation of non compatible tasks that could permit one person to perform and cover up fraud that may result in financial loss or misstatement by the company. Segregation of duties may be within an application or within the organization
Why is Enforcing SAP Audit Compliance Essential?
With properly implemented segregation of duties the company could have the business process and the IT systems properly associated and perform smoothly.
This helps the company or organization controlling and monitoring the users in the system from having too much access and thereby enabling them to coming fraud.
Serves to foil unintentional errors and with the monitoring turned on the error or fraud could be caught immediately instead of knowing about the problem one or two years down the road.
With advent of more and more companies going public and interacting with the investors, Segregation of duties is becoming very vital part of an accurately functioning internal control environment. this also helps the companies with the audit costs and saves them the working capital.
The current regulatory environment provides lot of opportunities for sap audit automation tools for helping companies with their segregation of duties problems. There are many commercial software solutions available in the marketplace to provide an automated platform to maintain and enforce SAP Audit compliance by providing features such as defining and monitoring Segregation of Duties (SOD), monitoring critical transactions execution by the user, fine tuning authorizations objects, and reporting
Some of the general features in the SAP audit solution products in the market are the following:
1. The SOD analysis can be forced to be performed when there is a change to user account or creation of new account. this could prevent SAP risk being introduced into the SAP System.
2. The tool can also act and prevent transactions being added to the role when they are created. thus the system administrator is forced to take action when he adds a risky transaction or object to the role.
3. The SOD rule set can be customized to your own industry or company. let say your company is getting all the material master from an external system, then you can turn off some of the rules which deals material master transactions.
4. with the system in place you have very powerful reporting solution for the external auditors and internal auditors.
5. The mitigation controls can be documented and monitored. this will help the internal auditing team from not relying on manual controls.
Thus all the companies who have SAP System should look for ways to accommodate SAP audit solution as part of SAP Audit compliance strategy.
