After behemoths like Adelphia, WorldCom and Enron started to fall in early 2001, new laws were put into place to ensure companies documented their actions or faced serious criminal charges.  The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, in a nutshell, prevented companies from “cooking the books” setting new or enhanced standards for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms.  There have been mixed reviews about how this law works – some feel it has given greater transparency to corporations, while others feel it has burdened smaller companies with behemoth compliance costs to ensure all records are backed up and properly stored.  Not to mention the number of companies going public in the U.S. dropped significantly in 2007 due to the serious reams of paperwork involved in compliance.  As a result, many companies took their business overseas, however, there are SOX-compliance entities in both Canada and Japan.

What Kind of Records Do You Need?

There are three areas you need to be aware of when working with your company to be SOX Compliant:

1) The first rule deals with destruction, alteration, or falsification of records.
2) The second rule defines the retention period for records storage.
3) The third rule refers to the type of business records that need to be stored, including all business records and communications, including electronic communications.

Add into the mix BYOD users, virtual offices and you have the perfect storm for SOX compliance issues.   SOX Compliance is the process of ensuring transparency of corporate disclosures by requiring that internal controls related to financial reporting are documented and tested to ensure the effectiveness of accounting controls in the construction of annual reports and other financial disclosures.

SecurShred offers our document scanning services, ideal for company accounting departments who need a simple system to store mission-critical documents.  We’re dedicated to providing a full cycle Electronic Document Management (EDM) solution for your business, from planning and preparation of the digital transition of your records, to implementing a private online document repository for your documents, and to the secure destruction of paper records.

Let us know how we can help your company preserve and organize your valuable documents and help you stay in compliance with our EDM services.