Sox Sux

[IT Grunt]

The title says it all. Ever since the Sarbanes-Oxley act came into being (a gift from our 'friends' at Enron), my life has become a living hell. Not only do accountants and other financial officers of a company have to abide by its rules, so do the developers of the IT systems said offices use (or any system that affects the company's bottom line.) This little gem of government legislation has brought out the latent SC in lots of my users, and today was no exception.

Background for a data change in one of the main apps:

Before Sox: All they had to do was call us with a problem and it was fixed.

After Sox: Now they have to set up a help ticket, I have to get my account in the database unlocked, take snapshots of all the data before I change it, change the data, take snapshots of the data after I changed it, build my Sox documentation, log it, get the account closed, have them review/approve it, update the log, close it all out. Needless to say, this takes /considerably/ longer than before.

Which brings me to today's call. I work in a manufacturing plant, so shipments are going out every day. Apparently, the shipping crew put one load on a truck, but shipped the wrong load in the system. Yours truly is called upon to fix it, and the above process kicks in. The help ticket goes in at 11:15. I've not done a lot of these, so I pick my co-workers brain for guidance. 11:50, I put in the request to get the account unlocked. The DBAs are at lunch, so I have to wait a bit. (A note on lunch hours at this place, people don't hold to the traditional 12 to 1, and they're not always just an hour.)

I get a call from the user at 1:08.

Her: Are you working on that load?
Me: Not yet, I need to get my account unlocked.
Her: What? You're not even started yet? The truck has been here for hours!
Me: (I didn't ship the wrong load in the first place, lady.) I understand that, but there's nothing I can do until the DBA unlocks my account.
Her: um.. well.. ok.. but we have to get this fixed! The truck is waiting.
Me: (Then stop calling so I can work on it.) I'll let you know when I'm done.

So, the DBA is back, unlocks my account, I get it fixed. I go down to her desk to have her look it over, and I happen to catch her on the phone bitching and moaning to my co-worker about the situation. She didn't know I was standing there, so I heard a few gems about me. "I hope he understands the urgency on these things, when we need it fixed, we need it fixed now!"..."Yes, well, that's what he said. I don't know where he gets his instructions from, but these things have to be fixed right away! I had to get another load on that truck just to get him out of here..." Basically, my co-worker told her the same thing I told her: Sox requires we follow this process. No exceptions. I explain it again, after she notices I'm there. "Yes, well, we really need to get these fixed right away..." blah, blah, blah, heard it all before.



I didn't write the rules, the government did.

[RentalRacer]

So glad someone posted something about SOX...it sucks!! Makes what used to be an easy job into a 15 step process!

[Banrion]

Tell me about it. I work in accounting for a major INSURANCE company!!! I have to keep copies of everything in quadruplicate, but they won't give me anywhere to store it! 4 times a year people who don't know anything about what I do or why come in and interrogate me on every detail of everything I do, preventing me from doing my work for the whole week.

I second your sentiment of I HATE SOX!!!

[Auto]

Sorry, but I'm a fan of Sox.

Too many corporations were abusing shareholders, creditors and others who relied on what management was telling them.

After too many innocent parties got burned, Congress decided to force managers to attest to the accuracy of their financial statements or risk going to jail. That management thinks it's too much of a burden? Tough.

[zzapp the witch]

I like my sox. They're fuzzy and they keep my feet warm, and keep them from chafing in my shoes.

[Rapscallion]

I saw this thread and thought I'd have to move it to off topic due to being a sports thread

Rapscallion

[Gravekeeper]

I too thought this would be something about sports. I was waiting for some sort of story about you being chased around a store by a drunken baseball fan threatening to spank you with a giant "We're #1" foam hand if you didn't give him a discount because his team won yesterday.

Heck, I would have settled for a story that simply involved spanking in some way.

But government stuff? Gah! We have some government clients at work here and they require us to process all their calls on their web interfaces. I don't know if you've ever tried to enter several pages of info into a web interface designed by government officials but its like playing Scrabble all day then suddenly being told on your next turn you can only use the Greek alphabit.

But you can only use certain letters during certain months and some letters can't be legally used till spring 2007 or can't be used anymore since winter 2006. But callers will insist that they can use them anyway and bitch and swear at you that they were allowed to "Do it this way last time" when you refuse. Despite the fact that doing it "this way" would result in fraud charges.

Oh, and any word you manage to spell has to be documented in triplicate then one copy of it re-entered into a web database while another copy is re-entered into an entirely different form that has to be emailed to the exact same office that's hosting the web database to begin with.

Oh and you have to do it all in under 3 minutes or it affects your stats. ><

So yes, government ideas....even if its a good idea the implementation is usually sucktastic and time consuming for no apparent reason.

[IT Grunt]

So yes, government ideas....even if its a good idea the implementation is usually sucktastic and time consuming for no apparent reason.

Precisely the point I was trying to make, thank you! It's starting to wear on my nerves listening to people gripe about how long it takes to do things, when I can't change the rules, and if I don't follow them, management takes great pleasure in ripping me a new orifice. On top of that, the client in turn rips my management a new orifice, and then they turn around and rip a new one on me next to the one they already put there.

In summary, it is a case of the ends not justifying the means as far as I'm concerned. There's got to be better ways to prevent a repeat of Enron than slapping a thousand miles of red tape on the workers and departments who had nothing to do with Enron's situation, such as IT. Enron's upper management and their auditing group conspired to fudge the books, not the company workers.

I saw this thread and thought I'd have to move it to off topic due to being a sports thread.

I thought about that right after I posted it, that people might think I was talking about the White Sox.

[Lehk]

any chance of redesigning the system?

i'm not up on SOX rules but would it be permissable to allow a time period where warehouse staff could roll back their own mistakes, perhaps have the application allow edits for the first 10 minutes in the form of some sort of errata entry. obviously the errata entries would have to be carefully audited but that would be easy if they are flagged as such.

having to call in tech support due to selecting the wrong thing in the computer seems like a big headache that could be avoided.

[IT Grunt]

any chance of redesigning the system?

i'm not up on SOX rules but would it be permissable to allow a time period where warehouse staff could roll back their own mistakes, perhaps have the application allow edits for the first 10 minutes in the form of some sort of errata entry. obviously the errata entries would have to be carefully audited but that would be easy if they are flagged as such.

having to call in tech support due to selecting the wrong thing in the computer seems like a big headache that could be avoided.

My co-worker (who's worked on it a lot longer than me) and I discussed it during this very scenario, but the problem is, there is more than one 'un-ship' method, and even then, it's not always the same depending on the situation, so it's very hard to make a screen to do it. It is a very big headache, no arguments there. The problem is the system was built over 15 years ago, and their business practices have changed a good bit since then. It's a legacy system, held together with popsicle sticks and duct tape, that's a pain to change. For them, it's easier to just have us do it this way, Sox or no sox, than to pay us to make the modifications it would take to allow them to do it. That's what it all boils down to in the end, money.