The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is mandatory. all organizations, large and small, must comply.

Check out this website that is intended to assist and guide. It provides information, and identifies resources, to help ensure successful audit, and management. If you are entirely new to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, this information should prove to be of substantial value.

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The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, sponsored by U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes and U.S. Representative Michael Oxley, represents the biggest change to federal securities laws in a long time. It came as a result of the large corporate financial scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Arthur Andersen. Effective in 2006, all publicly-traded companies are required to submit an annual report of the effectiveness of their internal accounting controls to the SEC.

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Business executives and managers have to develop at least basic skills in financial management. Expecting others in the organization to manage finances is clearly asking for trouble.

Basic skills in financial management start in the critical areas of cash management and bookkeeping, which should be done according to certain financial controls to ensure integrity in the bookkeeping process. Executives and managers should soon go on to learn how to generate financial statements (from bookkeeping journals) and analyze those statements to really understand the financial condition of the business.

Financial analysis shows the "reality" of the situation of a business–seen as such, financial management is one of the most important practices in management. This topic will help you understand basic practices in financial management, and build the basic systems and practices needed in a healthy business

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If you can read a nutrition label or a baseball box score, you can learn to read basic financial statements. If you can follow a recipe or apply for a loan, you can learn basic accounting. The basics aren’t difficult and they aren’t rocket science.

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Created by President George W. Bush’s executive order in July 2002, the task force was the president’s signature response to the flood of revelations of criminal wrongdoing in America’s boardrooms. Enron Corp. had collapsed the previous fall. Its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, was charged in March 2002 with obstruction of justice.

Later that spring, Adelphia Communications Corp. announced it would restate earnings by a billion dollars to account for hundreds of millions of dollars looted by senior executives. By the time allegations of a $3 billion fraud by WorldCom Inc. executives surfaced in June 2002, the leading stock indexes seemed locked in a death spiral, with investors panicked about which public company holding their retirement funds might topple next.

The new task force, by marshalling the firepower of nine different federal law enforcement agencies, was designed to restore investor confidence–and to deliver a strong dose of deterrence to executive suites.

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Embezzlers are out there, and they are more common than you might think. Look around the office. Is it possible one of your employees is an embezzler?

Every day there are newspaper stories about how an employee has managed to divert company funds to his or her own pocket.

For example, I recently read about a bank employee who set up a line of credit for a business–without ever telling the business owner.

The bank employee proceeded to draw on the line of credit and racked up a big debt for the business while spending the money at a local casino.

In another instance, a friend’s father ran a consulting business with a partner. Unbeknownst to him, the partner set up a secret business account using their company name. Every so often, he would deposit a business check into his secret account, effectively stealing the money for his own purposes.

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