SOX compliance costs U.K. firms.

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According to Accenture, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations cost U.K. businesses $1 million per $1 billion of revenue. The good news is that second- and third-year compliance costs could be 30 to 40 percent lower than first-year costs if companies did the work right the first time around.

But for organizations that have simply implemented quick fixes, there will still be work to do, the research firm said.

More than half of U.K. information technology managers surveyed by Accenture said they have made staffing changes to support compliance and will continue to demand extra staffing over the next few years.

For many companies the next step is to automate as much as they can of the compliance work. Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that company chiefs are hoping to trim the cost of compliance. It found that "tighter scoping of required actions" is the number one area where they hope to shave off some cost, with automating controls another target.

And SOX has been expensive for most U.K. companies, according to reports. According to Silicon.com, many companies are only now starting to take stock of the huge amounts they spent on compliance--and many are starting to wonder whether they spent it wisely.

Section 404 of SOX, which came into effect in November 2004, stipulates that companies trading publicly in the United States must have policies and controls in place to secure, document, and process information dealing with their financial results and all transactions.

Fear of fines or even jail time drove huge corporate spending, and now many organizations are finding that much of their compliance budget was misspent.

Some experts have said that many companies overspent, believing that throwing money at the problem might get the job done quickly. Businesses threw large amounts of money toward compliance-related technology, overtaxing their budgets.

Jim Burns, a partner at Deloitte and Touche, told Silicon.com: "A lot of money was spent on SOX. And a lot of questions are now being asked about the value it delivered."

Experts say SOX will get less expensive when companies can sort out what expenditures were necessary and which were not.

They also say some U.K. companies not formally covered by SOX are complying with it anyway because they think that it is good business practice to do so. Many organizations are concerned that European legislators may introduce SOX-style regulations next.