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SOX Evidence Collection and Review

General IT Use Case

An AI agent designed to automatically access various business applications and repositories to gather predefined evidence required for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) control testing, perform initial checks for completeness or obvious errors, and organize the evidence for auditor review.

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Process Details

Inputs

  • List of SOX controls and their associated evidence requirements
  • Specific parameters for data retrieval (e.g, date ranges, report names)
  • Templates for expected evidence format (where applicable)

Outputs

  • Collected and organized SOX control evidence
  • Report of evidence completeness and initial validation results
  • List of exceptions or issues encountered during data gathering

Systems

Describe it in English.
It runs deterministically.

This use case solution follows these general steps at a high level.

  • 01
    Receives a list of SOX controls to be tested and the specific evidence required for each (e.g., system-generated reports, screenshots of configurations, approval logs)
  • 02
    Access various Business Applications (e.g., ERP systems like SAP/Oracle, CRM like Salesforce, HRIS like Workday), run reports, or query databases to extract the required evidence, and retrieves documents from Document Management Systems (e.g., SharePoint, OpenText) or shared drives
  • 03
    Performs basic checks on the retrieved evidence, such as verifying report date ranges, checking for signatures on approval forms, ensuring file completeness, or matching key parameters against control attributes
  • 04
    Organizes the collected evidence in a structured manner (e.g., by control ID, testing period) within a designated secure repository.
  • 05
    Flags any missing evidence, access issues, or evidence that fails initial validation checks, and notifies the relevant control owner or auditor

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Frequently Asked Questions

It can interact with systems in multiple ways:
APIs: For modern applications with available APIs.
Scripts: For legacy systems or databases.
File Processing: It can parse user lists from various formats, including CSV, Excel, and even structured text within PDFs.
This is done by translating your existing risk and control matrix into a "collection plan" for the agent.
For each control, you define:
The source application.
The specific report or document needed.
The parameters for the extraction (e.g., date ranges, company codes).
The validation checks to perform. This configuration is typically done once and then simply executed each testing period.
Because the collection plan is maintained separately from the core automation logic, updating a task is straightforward. If a control changes to require a new report, your team can simply update the plan on the Kognitos platform to point to the new source. This modular design means you can adapt to changes in your control environment without needing a major redevelopment project.

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