Sign-Off 

Use

Managers use sign-off to confirm that controls documented in Management of Internal Controlsare appropriate and up-to-date. Sign-off is performed bottom-up. This means that the managers of the lowest organizational units in the Organizational Hierarchy first perform sign-off, then the managers in the level directly above, and so forth. Once sign-off has been performed at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, the CEO and the CFO perform sign-off for all internal controls of the corporate group.

To achieve compliance with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, sign-off must be performed at the end of the fiscal year. However, you can also perform sign-off more frequently, such as at the end of each quarter. Sign-off does not relate to a specific point in time, but instead to the entire timeframe for which sign-off is performed.

Integration

In the Start Page, you can show the Monitor: Sign-Off in the information area to monitor the status of sign-off. The prerequisite for this is authorization to perform sign-off or for the task Display Sign-Off  (DISP-SIGNO).

Prerequisites

·        In Customizing for MIC, the settings under Sign-Off have been performed.

·        In the organizational hierarchy, the Sign-Off indicator is set for every organizational unit for which sign-off is to be performed.

·        The managers of the organizational units who are to perform sign-off as well as the CEO and CFO have authorization for the task Perform Sign-Off for Organizational Unit (PERF-SOFOU). For more information, see Assigning Roles to Persons.

Features

Sign-off is triggered with the central scheduling of the task Perform Sign-Off (see Task Scheduling).

The managers of the organizational units at the lowest level of the organizational hierarchy then receive the task Perform Sign-Off in their task list. Once sign-off has been completed for all lower-level organizational units, the task Perform Sign-Off is sent automatically to the manager of the organizational unit on the next level up. Once sign-off has been completed for all organizational units, the task Perform Sign-Off appears in the worklists belonging to the CEO and the CFO.

Managers check the status of the internal controls in Reporting as the basis for performing sign-off.

It is permitted for issues and remediation plans to be open when sign-off occurs. However, the manager responsible for sign-off needs to enter a comment in the comment fields for each issue belonging to the issue types for which sign-off is relevant (the relevance setting is made in Customizing). The person performing sign-off can enter a comment stating, for example, that, in his/her opinion, the issues will be reliably resolved by implementing the remediation plans entered in the system.

As soon as sign-off has been performed for a timeframe, no more changes are permitted for this timeframe. However, any open issues are automatically carried forward to the new timeframe (see Carryforward into New Timeframe).