Sarbanes-Oxley For Investment Departments

The Sarbanes-Oxley for Investment Departments Seminar was created to more precisely address the specific requirements that SOX has placed upon the investment department of an institutional investor. This program is ideal for investment accountants, internal and external auditors, IT professionals, securities operations and both front-office and back-office staff members. Also, SOX team leaders and members of management from nearly every level of the organization can benefit from the better understanding of how this regulation directly impacts the entire investment process.

Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley can be made easier with well-defined and accepted best practices for all investment operations. This session will discuss a prescriptive methodology for how to begin evaluating a company's operational controls that support the investment department, a reporting mechanism to determine where they are, and a standard of evaluation for measuring how well a company's controls meet compliance requirements.

This two-day seminar is an alternative to most guidance given by audit firms that are entirely descriptive, and does nothing to explain what management must do to create assurance around their systems of internal controls. As a consequence, the relationship between operations, IT, accounting and audit is often characterized by stressful interviews and meetings, painful remedial plans, and an adversarial relationship that often results in a downward spiral of misunderstandings, unneeded work, and sometimes even job terminations with no resolution in creating Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. The goal of this session is to discuss the most imperative tasks that need to be completed to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

The Sarbanes-Oxley for Investment Departments Seminar is appropriate for staff members of all levels and no prior understanding of SOX or PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) is required.

DAY ONE

• Introduction/Course Objectives
• Background of Act and Application for Investment Departments
  • Section 103 - Record retention
  • Section 201 - Independent consultants
  • Section 301 - "Whistleblower" procedure
  • Section 302 - Financial reports attestation
  • Section 404 - Internal controls
  • Ongoing requirements
  • Section 409 - Real-time disclosure
  • PCAOB Standards and IT
  • Converging Requirements

DAY TWO

• Investment Department Planning
  • SOX project objectives
  • SOX project plans and key roles
  • Lessons learned
  • Accounting and auditing's role in SOX
  • IT and the system’s department role in SOX
  • Testing of internal controls
• Benchmark your SOX team's roles, responsibilities, and capabilities
• Financial reporting fraud - "red flags"
• Audit committees and whistleblowing programs
• Protecting the audit committee from claims of failure
• Discussion and question and answer forum