From Baseline…
Corporate America just ended its second year under Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, which, among other mandates, requires corporations to keep, secure and document the controls they use in their financial reporting.
Last month, across America, auditors were finishing up their work for 2005. So, it’s too early to tell how many companies failed to meet their SarbOx obligations.
For 2004, however, corporate-rating service Moody’s Investors Service did a count and found that about 5% of the companies it had been watching fell short of the government’s financial requirements. Among them: BearingPoint, the subject of this month’s cover story.
An interesting side note to the story is that the company’s chief information officer, Thomas Wilde, resigned at the end of last year to pursue other interests. And the company, says a spokesman, has not made “a determination on how that position will be handled going forward.”
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But while companies certainly can get by for a while without a chief information officer, it’s probably not a good idea these days for BearingPoint or any other company to leave the post vacant for any extended period of time.