A question regarding SOX compliance, somewhat urgent.. 2198



  • My organization is in the process of implementing Business Objects for centralized reporting capabilities(we are a third party logistics organization). We use a freight auditing firm to ensure that invoices sent to us by carriers that we use are charging us correctly. However there is a problem with the ‘freight auditing’ firm as they are not correctly checking all invoices sent to them by carriers. We would like Business Objects to take a look at these invoices and match them against our pre-determined rates to make sure we are not being overcharged.
    This does not seem to be an issue that would involve SOX as the freight auditing company is not a ‘public accounting firm’. The point of contention is that the IT guy seems to think that he can’t get involved with helping to automate the checking of invoices by our carriers against our rate schedule, as he thinks this is a SOX delineated area; however, I think that he is simply misinterpreting the function and applicability of SOX. The question is, is this activity of checking our carrier invoices against our rate schedules by a ‘freight auditing company’ under the auditing definition according to SOX?
    From what I understand, SOX applies to public accounting firms that are engaged in auditing financial statements with the intent of presenting an opinion, and isn’t related to this separate issue of ‘auditing’ as performed by this freight auditing firm. Is that correct or is there more to the issue? Thanks in advance for any input.
    I originally posted this in the general forum, but after taking a closer look at the sub-forums I realized it belongs here.



  • On the face of it as you state the situation, you are correct about SOX. SOX would not apply to the work you want done - nothing to do with it at all.
    It could be that the same sort of process WITHIN THEIR ORGANIZATION is a SOX key control, and they are incorrectly assuming that any such process wherever encountered is part of a SOX rule. If that explains their bizzare viewpoint, then I would explain that his SOX and your SOX are two different things.


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