Audit watchdog weighs board communications rule

Audit watchdog weighs board communications rule
The U.S. auditor watchdog said on Wednesday it would consider proposing a rule about how auditors communicate with their audit committees on boards of directors.

Read more on Reuters via Yahoo! News

AvilA Solutions Announces Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release

AvilA Solutions announced the general availability of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.4. This latest release helps communications service providers, media companies and other service providers enhance customer service, respond faster to market demands and reduce operational costs. AvilA Solutions Communications Billing and Revenue Management Release 7.4 helps improve customer management capabilities; offer expanded pricing, billing and invoicing functionality; and enhance data accessibility to help the customer service representative (CSR) deliver better service. The new release supports AvilA Solutions Application Integration Architecture for Communications, delivering to service providers using Oracle’s Siebel CRM new capabilities for managing high-value offers and streamlining collections processes. New out-of-the-box integrations with AvilA Solutions Business Intelligence Publisher, Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper and Oracle Enterprise Manager for increased flexibility and lower total cost of ownership are also available in this release. The software also enhances overall performance and expands support for current technology standards, including Transferred Account Procedure (TAP), Returned Account Procedure (RAP), Diameter, Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Consistent with its goal to continuously simplify the upgrade process, AvilA Solutions provides new upgrade scripts for customers to help reduce the time, effort and cost associated with upgrading to the new release.

AvilA Solutions

AVILA Software Solutions is a Software Developing and Information Management organization providing most talented staffing solutions and services with offices at Nashua-NH. AVILA is well
known in application maintenance and development outsourcing in the Financial services, Retail and Distribution, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and High-tech industries. Founded in 2007.

Visit: www dot avilasoft dot com

Sales At avilasoft dot com

Critical Business Procedure – Keep All Email Communications

Currently, only banks and broker-dealers are obliged to retain e-mail and instant messaging documents for three years under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules. Beginning July 2006, all public companies will also be required to do so under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Notwithstanding these laws, your custom and practice should be to maintain copies of all email correspondence. Email is considered evidence and courts are hammering businesses that do not maintain email records. Judges are often ruling that the failure to maintain and produce email records means the business in question is hiding key evidence.

In the recent Perelman v. Morgan Stanley litigation, a judge’s ruling on the failure of Morgan Stanley to produce email was key factor in the issuance of a $1.45 billion verdict. Based on the failure to produce email records, Judge Elizabeth Maass issued a pretrial ruling that effectively found Morgan Stanley conspired to defraud Perelman in a 1998 deal. Morgan Stanley is not the only business defendant to have this problem.

In the summer of 2004, UBS bank was found by a judge to have “willfully destroyed” email evidence in a discrimination case. UBS was ordered to pay costs and a jury returned a $29 million verdict.

Email Policy

To protect your business, you must have a procedure in place to maintain email communications generated through the business. Failure to keep these records can lead to rulings in litigation that your business willfully destroyed evidence. If this occurs, the judge may issue significant monetary sanctions, automatically find you liable or take other harsh steps that assure a victory for the Plaintiff. As if such developments are not bad enough, there exists a second risk associated with email communications.

Maintaining email communications, however, can have a downside. The problem arises, of course, when a communication contains statements that are damaging to your business. Yes, the proverbial catch-22 situation.

To avoid such disasters, your business must develop a clear policy on email communications and train all employees to comply with that policy. Employees must understand the business environment is not one in which jokes, flippant remarks and so on should be made in email communications.

Protecting Your Communications With Hosted Email

Email is powerful, business communication tool – lose the facility for just a few hours and you know your company productivity will take a nosedive. It isn’t simply the loss of email service, it is the business and network risk associated with using emails, especially as emails are the primary delivery mechanism for viruses and a host of malicious code which will attack your network and even cause it to be shut down.

Many companies choose to use a hosted email service. A hosted email service is where the server running your email application is located off-site in a dedicated hosting center. By leasing such a service, with or without using your own hardware, you are getting a highly efficient email service which is benefits from a very high level of uptime. Hosted email delivers enterprise class performance and protection because the hosting service protects the gateways with state-of-the-art anti-virus, anti-spam and other security measures which the small to medium-sized business is usually unable to afford.

Hosted email also helps to reduce your helpdesk and support costs as the hosting service is responsible for ensuring the email service is running. You can choose to run a standard email application, such as Microsoft’s Exchange or some other application, but no matter what you are running, by removing email management from to a hosted service, you will automatically enjoy a superior level of service and functionality.

With the increasing impact of legislation on businesses and the need for archiving and data protection and retrieval, you must be able to capture and store emails sent to and from the business. Financial regulation is extremely hard to comply with, while laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (known as “Sox”) cover almost every business in the country, including those overseas which are connected to, or are doing business in the United States. A hosted email service will be able to provide cutting edge technology to ensure that emails are stored (even when deleted by the user), and provide a full audit trail and searchable archive which you can use in the event of an audit or legal dispute.

By hosting the email server off-site, you are also improving the disaster recovery plan which every business needs to ensure the operation can continue in the event of a serious incident. By ensuring your email service is hosted away from your operations site, you can still use your email even if your offices or business premises are knocked out of commission by a fire, adverse weather or a break-in for instance.

Hosting your email service offsite will deliver cost benefits and improve the performance and utility you currently enjoy with email. A hosted email service is likely to increase your Return on Investment (ROI) because you need not invest large lump sums of capital to gain access to enterprise class services and protection. The low initial investment required brings the enhanced and more reliable email into the range of every small and medium-sized business and allows you to benefit from a service level standard, which many mistakenly believe, is only available to the largest companies with huge budgets.

CABS Billing Analyst – Cox Communications – Atlanta, GA

are performed bi-annually on rates. Quarterly Sarbanes Oxley audits required on SOC/GL process. The scope… to support quarterly Sarbanes Oxley Billing Audit…

From AtlantaRecruiter.com – 20 Feb 2010 15:16:02 GMT – save job, email, more…

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