Information Technology Professionals Meet Sarbanes-Oxley

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA) is a law that will affect the lives of top level company officers along with finance and accounting professionals. Top level officers are responsible for the veracity of financial reporting under the SOA. Finance and accounting professionals have traditionally been the corporation's experts regarding financial and operational controls. However, in today's world, information technology (IT) professionals play a key role in designing and maintaining the systems that enforce those controls. This paper examines the challenges that IT professionals will face as they find themselves face-to-face with the provisions of the SOA, a law that could put executives in jail and cause middle managers to lose their jobs.