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Sarbanes Oxley

Controlling financial reporting has never been more important than it is in today’s highly regulated corporate environment. The recent introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley in the US has meant that US listed companies need to ensure that their spreadsheets are controlled.

Spreadsheets were designed to capture and manipulate financial information. However, with so many different inter-related spreadsheets, containing a variety of formulas and with simple human intervention, errors are bound to, and do, creep in.

PricewaterhouseCoopers research showed that 91% of spreadsheets have at least a 5% error margin. KPMG found the s am e percentage with major errors. Butler discovered that 86% of spreadsheet errors result in extra tax payments.

The causes of these findings often have dire consequences in businesses. For ex am ple:

a financial misstatement by NASA resulted in a difference of $644 million. The cause was a misinterpretation of guidance and errors in the administration’s ad hoc process for generating budgetary information, based on undetected errors in the spreadsheet process.

A Canadian company, TransAlta, took a $24 million knock on a bid for US power transmission when an employee performed a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet. The bid went ahead in accordance with the law in New York , even after the error was discovered.

For a comprehensive list of more significant errors that have been uncovered visit www.eusprig.org/stories.htm.

We believe that the best way to control these errors is to:

Have appropriate tools that can document spreadsheets - so that the auditors/regulators requirements
will be met and can be shown to have been met.

Have appropriate tools that can test spreadsheets - so that spreadsheet errors can be
eradicated.

Ensure that all involved in the spreadsheet creation process are aware of the issues,
and have training to help them address them.

We are very pleased to announce that we have teamed with Miricle Solutions to provide a combined
package to address the issues posed by Sarbanes Oxley. The package consists of Spreadsheet Professional together with Miricle Solutions acclaimed video training package. Please download our paper on Sarbanes-Oxley by clicking on this link.

This is provided on a single installation package for ease of roll-out across
the organisation. The video training which is closely linked to Spreadsheet Professional describes in
detail the errors associated with Spreadsheets, how to avoid them and how to use Spreadsheet
Professional to detect them and document your spreadsheets.

The package is offered at a substantial discount to the costs of either package alone. For more information please contact sales@spreadsheetinnovations.com.


	Sarbanes Oxley - Requirement to document all Spreadsheets used in accounts production. - Significant penalties if errors discovered - New requirements already causing problems for many firms

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