Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, every financial executive knows the importance - and cost - of maintaining effective internal controls. After documenting and testing their internal controls for first-year SOX compliance, many companies were forced to implement more manual controls to satisfy the demands of their auditors. Now that this costly process is over, financial executives should evaluate how they can optimize their controls to improve business process, such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, capital projects, and financial accounting and reporting.

Original Air Date: Oct. 12, 2005

Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman leads a discussion on the best practices of SOX compliance and controls optimization to drive business process improvements. Paul shares insights from his industry research on best practices and lessons learned in SOX compliance as companies look to strengthen their internal controls, reduce compliance costs and realize business value from SOX-related activities. This 1-hour webcast drills down into specific controls-related topics and issues, including:

• The maturity stages for internal controls management, from documentation to optimization
• Categories of software tools for managing internal controls activities
• Continuous controls monitoring tools capabilities
• Driving quality in financial operations

Oversight Systems CEO Patrick Taylor builds upon Paul's research to present real case studies that demonstrate how Fortune 500 companies have improved their financial processes with real-time transaction inspection. This webcast explains how technology can be used as a virtual auditor to:

• Monitor 100% of the transactions through your financial system
• Identify and correct errors in real time
• Recognize where errors most frequently occur in the process
• Identify emerging risks in financial reporting

Parson Consulting's Anne Marchetti has 20 of years of finance and accounting experience in both private industry and public accounting. Ms. Marchetti is a Sarbanes-Oxley subject matter expert, focusing on internal control systems and procedures to produce reliable financial information as well as the development of corporate governance programs. As a thought leader in this area, she has assisted in developing a compliance methodology and has spoken at numerous conferences as well as published several articles on this particular subject. Ms. Marchetti recently authored a book entitled Beyond Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance – Effective Enterprise Risk Management.