Re:Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging ...
by londons_explore on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @02:19PM
(#17349071)
I can confidently tell you that some of the largest companies in the world don't do this... Or at least don't do it to the level that an auditor could confidently say "nobody nefariously edited this code/data".
So Sarbanes-Oxley came about because Enron were stating investor-facing metrics that didn't match reality. SOX compliance comes about if you:
If those numbers are counted by a computer, you must show that you have procedures in place to prevent a single person from making a change to the code which would allow them to choose what number is produced.So, if you were some web app that mentioned Monthly Active Users in your quarterly results: bam! Your release process now has to be SOX-compliant, since the MAU calculations come from analytics (from the frontend, or from access logs) which could be altered by some nefarious code.
Note that the intent of the act isn't to prevent such a thing from happening, but to make sure there is enough information for external auditors to detect it if it occurs.