A spreadsheet life cycle analysis and the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley

Compliance-Appropriate Spreadsheet Testing

Sarbanes–Oxley compliance requirements have forced firms to look at their use of spreadsheets in financial reporting. They are finding that they have many spreadsheets and that testing and other formal development disciplines are rare. The literature on spreadsheet errors has shown that without strong controls, most spreadsheets will have material errors; this means that firms that use uncontro...

Controls over Spreadsheets for Financial Reporting in Practice

Past studies show that only a small percent of organizations implement and enforce formal rules or informal guidelines for the designing, testing, documenting, using, modifying, sharing and archiving of spreadsheet models. Due to lack of such policies, there has been little research on how companies can effectively govern spreadsheets throughout their life cycle. This paper describes a survey i...

Sarbanes-Oxley: What About all the Spreadsheets?

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has finally forced corporations to examine the validity of their spreadsheets. They are beginning to understand the spreadsheet error literature, including what it tells them about the need for comprehensive spreadsheet testing. However, controlling for fraud will require a completely new set of capabilities, and a great deal of new research will be needed to deve...

Spreadsheets and Sarbanes-Oxley: Regulations, Risks, and Control Frameworks

Governance of Spreadsheets through Spreadsheet Change Reviews

We present a pragmatic method for management of risks that arise due to spreadsheet use in large organizations. We combine peer-review, tool-assisted evaluation and other pre-existing approaches into a single organization-wide approach that reduces spreadsheet risk without overly restricting spreadsheet use. The method was developed in the course of several spreadsheet evaluation assignments fo...