Humana Inc. And the Sarbanes-Oxley Article Review

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To improve security procedures, annual compliance training for all employees is mandated at Humana.

Humana has also been praised for its positive organizational attitude in adapting to HIPAA and SOX, although corporate officials acknowledged that some aspects of meeting regulatory goals were challenging. Still, compliance with both legislative acts has been portrayed by top management as 'good hygiene' in terms of patient security and accounting practices. There was none of the excessive hostility or secrecy sometimes seen when adapting to new regulatory challenges at other corporations (Fitzgerald, 2006, p.50). This attitude made all employees more willing to take such steps as memorizing rather than writing down passwords, which may have proved an irritant had not the organization stressed its necessity.

In fact, there is more overlap between Sarbanes-Oxley than might be immediately obvious, making Humana's experiences with both HIPAA and SOX equally illustrative. SOX was originally passed to limit off-book transaction and make fraud less easy to conceal.
But requiring internal controls implies that the system used to keep track of a corporation's bookkeeping is secure (Hurley 2003). And having a secure system where all the necessary information is retrievable will likely make it easier to comply with future regulation. That is perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from Humana's experience: the more rigorous an organization is in following current guidelines, the less costly and cumbersome new internal controls are to adopt.

References

Beal, Barney. (2003, November 21). Seven steps to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

SearchCIO. Tech Target. Retrieved April 22, 2010 at tp://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci938537,00.html

Fitzgerald, M. (2006, June). The art of compliance. CIO Insight. 69, 44-53.

Hurley, Edward. (2003, September 25). Security and Sarbanes-Oxley.

SearchCIO. Tech Target. Retrieved April 22, 2010 at http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci930493,00.html.....

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