At my old company, data was managed very haphazardly and pretty much anyone could get access to systems internally if they asked the right people. SOX made us tighten down our systems, document our systems and actually come up with back up strategies which were barely there before. It actually required admins and dba's to learn the systems that they were working with better and in turn exposed a number of large potential issues that we might not have found before. After the first 2 years of SOX audits, it just became another yearly ritual for us, same as year end reporting and routine maintenance. One can imagine how many public companies might have fudged the numbers in today's economy if SOX wasn't a concern.