Companies in Europe are behind American companies in how fast they’re adopting to the requirements of various Compliance measures. In the US, only 11 percent of large companies say that their firms still are not SOX compliant. Contrast that to Europe where as many as 46 percent of companies doing business in the US are not SOX compliant. One might expect the gap to be due to the fact that SOX regulations are US-based.
But even when looking at the European Basel II regulations, European companies are lagging. 36 percent of European companies are not compliant while 17 percent of US companies doing business in Europe were not compliant.
Hoefully the gap will close soon though. 45 percent of European companies say that they’ve increased the amount of money that they’re allocating towards compliance measures. 40 percent of the companies say that they are increasing budget because there are continually new regulations being introduced.
One problem though is that many European companies are addressing compliance with manual procedures rather than electronic systems. As many as half of the companies say that they do not have an electronic repository. And 75 percent said that their controls were a hybrid of electronic and manual systems.
