Compliance Bonanzas.

This section highlights the growth of information technology (IT) auditor vacancies in the U.S. as the year-end Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law compliance deadline looms in 2004. The latest salary bonanzas are not tied to arcane skills in Cobol programming but to IT auditing experience applicable to the slew of regulatory compliance issues companies are facing. Big accounting firms are hiring to improve their in-house expertise in everything from Sarbanes-Oxley to the Patriot Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the European Union's directive on privacy protection. Ernst & Young, for example, has expanded its IT risk practice by 30 percent in the past 10 months and has 200 openings to fill by the end of June 2004. A lot of people hope that all these regulatory mandates will turn out to be another kind of bonanza for IT. That they will force companies to clean out their data closets and reorganize business processes and elevate security and privacy protections to new heights of corporate support. Regulatory mandates are driving renewed urgency into IT security practices and raising awareness of privacy protection obligations for both the public and private sectors. Security risks will keep growing, new laws will keep piling responsibilities on IT, and the audit cycles will keep on coming. If there are indeed salary bonanzas coming with all this, IT will earn each and every one of them.