My bank is a community bank, asset size $350M, publicly traded. In 2009, for the first time, our external auditors will be performing an audit and issuing an opinion on our Internal Controls as well as our financial statements as required by SOX 404.

This is not going to be cheap! Their proposed fees for this one part of their work are an additional 40-60% of their regular audit fee.

I am interested in hearing from other similarly situated banks to see what other your accounting firms are charging for these services.

I would appreciate your feedback!

We do our own internal testing. Our external auditors come to walk throughs and do some independent testing, but rely heavily upon our work throughout the year. As far as fees, I don't have a % for you because its included in other audit services.

We have an internal audit function and do our own testing as well. The external accountants have said they plan to rely heavily on internal audit testing as they do every year. But they still will have to do extra testing in order to issue their SOX compliant opinion.

The CPAs are asking us to do a SOX risk assessment using the footnote disclosures in the annual report. We already do the risk assessments for balance sheet and income statement and individual accounts, so logically this does not make sense to me. Is anyone else having to do this?