# SOX-aligned controls for AI agents in finance systems

An agent in the ERP can draft — but it should never post, pay, delete, or approve on its own. These policies support SOX ICFR and ITGC controls on the agent channel.

For: Finance and audit owners piloting AI against the systems of record

SOX turns on the integrity of the financial record and the separation between who initiates a transaction and who approves it. An agent with write access to the ERP threatens both: it can post to a closed period, move money, or change a vendor's bank details from a single misread instruction. The controllable version is simple to state — the agent can draft, but never post, pay, delete, or approve — and the gateway is where that line holds.

`protect-closed-periods` denies edits and voids against posted transactions and closed periods, supporting the anti-alteration expectation behind §802. `gate-money-movement` caps and gates payments and payroll outside the finance group. `guard-vendor-banking` denies changes to vendor bank and payment details — the anti-BEC control auditors now ask about. `require-human-approval-merge` carries the same draft-then-human-approves posture into the ITGC change path for financial code.

The boundary: this covers the agent channel, not user provisioning, access reviews, or the financial-statement assertions themselves. Those stay with your ITGC program and your IdP. What the bundle adds is a demonstrable control that the automated actor cannot unilaterally post, pay, or destroy — plus the decision record proving it. The `sox` bundle collects the set.

## Policies in this guide

- [Protect Financial Postings by Role](https://www.intentbasedpolicy.com/policies/netsuite/protect-closed-periods) — Denies the NetSuite record-write tools ns createRecord and ns updateRecord when they target a financial-transaction record type — journalentry (including the…
- [Gate QuickBooks Money-Movement by Finance Group](https://www.intentbasedpolicy.com/policies/quickbooks/gate-money-movement) — Gates the QuickBooks Online money-movement creation tools — create payment, create bill payment, create refund receipt, create transfer, and create deposit —…
- [NetSuite Guard Vendor Banking Edits (Anti-BEC)](https://www.intentbasedpolicy.com/policies/netsuite/guard-vendor-banking) — Instantiates policy family PF-10 (guard-vendor-banking) — the anti-BEC / payment-fraud control — for the Oracle NetSuite MCP Standard Tools SuiteApp.
- [Require Human Approval: GitHub Merges & Approvals](https://www.intentbasedpolicy.com/policies/github/require-human-approval-merge) — Keeps a human in the loop on the two GitHub actions that consummate a code change: merging a pull request and approving one .