First the good news. It's a great time to be an accountant or an IT specialist. Florida-based Kforce Professional Staffing has released Salary & Employment Guides showing that there will be a shortage of technology specialists and accountants in 2006. That can only mean higher pays, with accountants getting big premiums on their salaries.

Technology-driven projects, venture capital and private equity markets are creating lots of demand. And hedge funds are turning into a growth market for accountants.

But let's cut to the chase. Sarbanes-Oxley and other Regulatory regimes are providing most of the work. Tom Blumer's BizzyBlog picks up on that point: SOX is forcing businesses to hire more accountants instead of investing their money in growth.

Trouble is the problem's not going to go away. It's all about the problem with compliance.

Kforce claims that the big drivers of this shortfall are an ageing skilled workforce and fewer graduating IT workers. But actually, that's telling only half the story, and for that matter, the less important half. And that's where the bad news comes in.

The real reason for the shortfall is that years after Sarbanes-Oxley and a host of other regulatory regimes around the world, companies are still having problems with compliance. It's a road without an end, a treadmill. Compliance is not a one-off exercise. That's why IT specialists and accountants are so hot.

I recently blogged on how regulatory problems are going to be messier and more complicated in 2006. The biggest irony of globalisation is that we have new rules coming in all the time across different jurisdictions.

And that's the awful truth about compliance. Gartner analyst Robert Handler says 100 per cent compliance is ''fundamentally impossible''. Or as Anne Bonaparte, the CEO and president of MailFrontier puts it: "Our compliance policy is to pray...No-one really believes there is a silver bullet -- a way to be compliant all the time. So, often what you encounter is, 'Let's wait to see who gets nailed, and maybe it won't be me.''

Still, the Newsfactor magazine piece in the above link does give some strategies to deal with the problem. The Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance journal also offers tips on how to develop an effective Enterprise Records Management (ERM) strategy.

Getting it right though requires a shift in the mind-sets of CIOS and IT managers. Their focus is on productivity, revenue growth, customer satisfaction and costs. Storing and managing documents is not the big priority. And if perfect compliance is impossible, then real compliance is all about risk management.