How GoHealth Streamlined Communication During Their First Year of SOX

In our Spotlight on Success series, Kanu Wadhwa, Director of Internal Audit & CAE at GoHealth and Jaclyn De Leo, Internal Audit Manager at GoHealth, share how their team leveraged AuditBoard to stand up their first-year SOX program. This Chicago, Illinois-based insurance company provides a marketplace for Medicare plans, as well as an online health insurance marketplace offering individual health insurance and short-term health insurance. Hear how this team put necessary processes in place and is positioned to scale as the company grows by implementing SOX management technology ahead of first-year SOX, including:

• Leveraging AuditBoard’s SOXHUB solution to centralize all documentation in a single source of truth.
• Streamlining communication during SOX testing with the business and external audit. Creating a strong controls environment by providing visibility to internal stakeholders to take ownership of their controls.

Tell us a little about your team at GoHealth, and your previous challenges with a manual audit environment. 

“Our team at GoHealth is pretty small — it’s myself and one manager. We co-source with an external third party to fill out the team. Our main focus right now is SOX compliance. I had actually implemented AuditBoard in my previous company. It went really well, and everybody liked it, so I came here knowing that I didn’t want to go back to shared drives, Excel files, and status update meetings. That’s why, when I started here, from the get-go I knew we were getting a tool, no matter what.” – Kanu Wadhwa, Director of Internal Audit & CAE at GoHealth

“My most recent audit experience was as a senior consultant at a large consulting firm. A lot of my clients did not use a platform or software for SOX, so I felt like a lot of my administration responsibilities were pretty tedious and very manual.” – Jaclyn De Leo, Internal Audit Manager at GoHealth

How has real-time visibility in AuditBoard helped create a strong controls environment?

“One of the issues that I had with prior clients in a manual environment is that control owners didn’t really own their controls. The nice thing about AuditBoard is that it allows us to really interact with those control owners.” – Jaclyn De Leo, Internal Audit Manager at GoHealth

“As we started using AuditBoard, the control owners really loved it. They all were on board about logging in frequently, looking at the controls that they had, making sure that their controls as written are accurate. If not, they would reach out to us to update.” – Kanu Wadhwa, Director of Internal Audit & CAE at GoHealth

GoHealth went through first-year SOX this year. How did having a technology solution in place help you streamline communication during testing?

“One time period where AuditBoard really helped our department was year-end testing. Since it was our first year of SOX, a lot of things were pushed back to year end, and we had a lot more than normal testing to do at year end. For both internal audit and external audit, AuditBoard really helped us. We used the PBC request functionality for all the audit and SOX requests for internal audit and external audit within the platform. Our external auditors had access to AuditBoard, and it was the one source for everything we used for SOX testing and documentation. We didn’t have to go through emails, we didn’t have to follow up — the tool followed up for us and made it easier.” – Kanu Wadhwa, Director of Internal Audit & CAE at GoHealth

How have AuditBoard’s education resources empowered your team to learn how you can configure the platform to fit your unique needs?

“One of the features in AuditBoard that I’ve used a lot, especially going through setup implementation and first-year SOX, is the AuditBoard Academy. I’ve actually watched a lot of those videos to remember how to do the workstreams, PBC requests, how to change permissions on user access to the system, and how to add new controls. I think that’s really beneficial that we can just go in, find a quick, 2-3 minute video or paragraph, and then we can update or change things in real time for ourselves.” – Kanu Wadhwa, Director of Internal Audit & CAE at GoHealth

What are your future plans for AuditBoard as your business and team continue to grow?

“I’m really happy that our company implemented AuditBoard because AuditBoard is continuing to evolve. As we expand outside of just SOXHUB, we can build in the different platforms when we start to do more operational audits.- Jaclyn De Leo, Internal Audit Manager at GoHealth