Resources for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Do You Know What’s In Your Employee’s Inbox?

www.s-ox.com

Email has become a primary means of communication that businesses use to send, receive, and store business-critical information. Since emails carry so much information, they have become an important source of evidence in legal cases. In fact, many recent corporate scandals involving email have led to the creation of new laws regulating the retention, monitoring, timely retrieval, and reporting of electronic records. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) Act requires all public companies (or companies intending to go public) to retain their business records, including email, for at least five years so that they can be easily retrieved for reporting or in case of legal discovery.

With regulations like SOx in place, organizations must take special precautions to ensure their employees do not send and receive any damaging emails via their workplace email account. Since SOx does not specify what constitutes a relevant document, it can be very complicated and risky to preserve only a certain number of emails and as such, all of an organization’s email should be retained. Because of this, organizations must take special precautions to ensure that the content of their employees’ emails is acceptable and will not pose any risk to the organization. However, according to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 68 percent of U.S. employees who use email at work have sent or received emails that could place their company at risk. Nearly half the people polled say they have sent or received jokes, comical pictures/videos, and stories of a questionable tone, while one in five say they have sent or received a password or log-in information via email. When shared through email, this type of content could pose significant risks to businesses, either from a possible security breach or employee-driven lawsuits.

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