IRS and state/federal regulatory audits aren’t the only background checks about which enterprises need to worry.

Increasingly, auditors are dropping by for a friendly chat and using familiar calling cards from companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Oracle and SAP, to name a few.

According to a recent IDC industry report, 63 percent of enterprises were audited by their software vendors in the last 18 to 24 months to determine whether they were out of compliance with their software contracts. The penalties—and these are usually unbudgeted—extracted from companies as a result of a contract issue can be costly as well as problematic. According to that report, 56 percent of organizations end up writing checks to send the auditor on his way—and 21 percent of the time those payments are $1 million or more. How can this be possible, and what can CIOs do to take the sting out of the auditor’s tail?

In this slide show, using eWEEK archives, the IDC report and industry advice from Flexera Software, we offer a list of to-do’s to solve this problem.

SOURCE: eweek.com