Now, check out this post, SOX & the Law of Unintended Consequences .
Here is an excerpt that caught my eye.

But woe to the start-ups, and woe to the small business innovators. Their processes are necessarily in flux. They need to prototype them, test them, modify them, expand them—in short, they need to do anything but document them to a set of standards administered by children who know nothing of business and even less about the industry in which the company competes. Encumber these companies with SOX audits, as we have, as we are intending to do even more, and basically you take them out of the game.
The unintended consequences? Well, consider which set of companies has driven our employment engine over the past decade. It is not the big guys. They are still laying off people in their effort to focus on core and outsource their context. Rather it has been the small to medium businesses that have driven all the job growth, and those are the very ones SOX is bringing to their knees.

SOX compliant Risk Assessment, control mechanisms, Monitoring & Auditing processes, and highly effective communication mechanisms are an absolute MUST for the IT Teams in these organizations in the current regulatory environment.
Given this, what are the problems then?

1. Many processes in small enterprises are not centralized & controlled.Examples here could be Travel Expense Management, Quote Generation
2. Inflexible Blackbox IT systems that provide no visibility into the Policies they enforce & are very difficult to change & adapt with the fast changing enterprise
3. Compliance audits require transactional visibility which is not there in most IT systems today. This impacts SOX initiatives and governance.
4. In many organizations, pricing, discount rules are found scattered in Excel sheets. This will be a red flag that will be highlighted in any Audit

OK, so what? Is there a solution here somewhere?
Now, Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) provide for exactly these kinds of pains.

1. Using a BRMS, all the pricing rules, expense validation rules can be centralized
2. BRMS will dramatically improve the visibility that a Business has into their IT Systems.
3. What are the rules that are being enforced?
4. What were the rules in force last month?
5. BRMS can provide fine grained Audit trails for every Rule that was ever violated or satisfied.
6. Using a BRMS, one will be able to provide any kind of upto date audit report anytime

Take Away
Business Rules Management Systems can enable an organization to effectively enforce & manage their Business Policies, and stay on top of their compliance efforts in a cost effective fashion.