Comply! Resistance is futile

Purpose – The goal of the paper is to detect any gaps in the legislator's and practitioner's approaches in information systems design and implementation and to evaluate their impact on an organizational and managerial level.Design/methodology/approach – Basic information system requirements are presented for compliance with the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act. These requirements are compared with the provisions made by the vendors (like SAP, Microsoft, etc.) to address the issues raised by the legislators and the OECD's corporate governance principles and guidelines to provide a holistic approach to the problem of corporate governance system alignment.Findings – The questions raised by the author are: did the legislators encapsulate the real essence of the OECD principles and did the ES designers manage to fully cover the letter and the spirit of the law or find a legalist‐normative solution to the problem of compliance (not alignment) with the laws and principles leading to a deviation from the original principles? I...