Corporate Compliance and its Implications to IT Professionals

Corporate financial misrepresentation and its consequences including the recent stock market meltdown has only exacerbated the need for more government vigilance on corporate governance. This has resulted in the introduction and enforcement of a plethora of regulations for corporate governance - regulatory and legislative compliance. Recently corporations have shifted their focus from reducing the risks associated with non-compliance to making corporate compliance an enterprise-wide, strategic initiative. In this paper, we provide an introduction to corporate compliance; discuss how information technology (IT) can be leveraged to provide solutions to corporate compliance. We also make a case for introducing compliance topics into software engineering courses and indicate ways to accomplish this.