Argumentative SOX compliant and intelligent decision support systems for the suppliers contracting process

Abstract

More and more our society is linked to the stability of financial markets and this stability depends on key players like private companies, financial markets, investors, analysts, government control agencies and so on. Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a mandatory law in EEUU market and a facto standard in rest of the world and has as main objective to keep the desire financial stability. Within this chapter it will be shown a new decision support intelligent financial model over SOX compatibility based on Artificial Intelligent technology together with Theory of Argumentation. The main aim of this model is to help and support private companies, auditors, executive boards and regulatory bodies to take a SOX compliant decision over an specific process of a typical purchasing financial cycle: The Contracting Process. The decision will be supported by the whole argumentation process drive by this model and will be reinforce with quality measures with the final objective to create a very clear argumentative background about the suggested decision. This model directly contributes to both scientific research artificial intelligence area and business sector. From business perspective it empowers the use of intelligent models and techniques to drive decision making over financial statements. From scientific and research area the impact is based on the combination of the following innovative elements: (1) an specific Information Seeking Dialog Protocol, (2) a Facts Valuation based Protocol in which previous gathered facts are analyzed, (3) the already incorporated initial knowledge coming from human expert knowledge, (4) the Intra-Agent Decision Making Protocol based on deductive argumentation and (5) the Semi Automated Fuzzy Dynamic Knowledge Learning Protocol giving as a result a novel approach to this kind of problems.