Horsham, PA. July 14, 2005: Relevante, Inc professionals presented on the “Impact of the SOX Act on the Pharma Industry” at an interactive session at the Drug Information Association’s Annual Meeting, held from the 26th- 30th June 2005 in Washington DC. The session was chaired by Joe Curran, CPA, Senior Advisor, Relevante, Inc. with Fred Kaplan, MBA, CBM, Director of Financial Consulting, Relevante, Inc & Robert Rausch, MBA, Consultant & former Vice President of Finance, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals both presenting. The session analyzed the impact of the Sarbanes Oxley Act on the Pharma industry with a focus on R&D costs & revenues. It also highlighted the control environment & the best practices to meet the requirements of the Act and post implementation considerations for Year 2 of SOX compliance.

While detailing the industry best practices, Robert Rausch, MBA advised the participants to “Move beyond the reactive SOX compliance steps to more proactive risk mechanisms, which enable management to identify and respond to risks before there is financial or reputation loss.”

“Companies now have an opportunity to create efficiencies in some of their control systems and can now identify the controls that are manual and detective versus automated and preventive” said Joe Curran, CPA while discussing the post implementation considerations for pharmaceutical companies.

“Compliance with internal control over financial reporting provisions of SOX is not a one-time event. For compliance in future, it is imperative that companies have someone in place to ensure that risk management programs are doing what they are designed to do” said Fred Kaplan, MBA, CBM.