Plenty of talk about the financial costs of Sarbanes-Oxley, the latest coming from oil giant BP which says SOX is costing it $100 million a year and findings from Gartner that IT financial compliance management spending will increase to between 10 percent and 15 percent of IT budgets in 2006, up from less than 5 percent in 2004.

But an Oversight Systems report suggests there's another big cost - on employee morale. It comes from mind-numbing repetitive work that some employees view as redundant and a distraction from their real job. The result: high turnover and a situation where there is a risk that all the hard work on compliance falls apart.

Ways to deal with the problem would include companies making more of an effort to link compliance with tangible business benefits. Linking it to pay packets and performance objectives would help too.