Heads up: The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations plans to unveil its long-awaited guidance on monitoring internal controls next week.

The introduction to the guidance is already available on the COSO Web site. The entire four-volume set of guidance will be available Feb. 4. Compliance Week will provide its readers full coverage of the details of final guidance in its Feb. 10 edition.

The monitoring guidance has been in the works for well over a year. A discussion document was published in September 2007, followed by the release of an exposure draft in June 2008.

The project stems from a post-Sarbanes-Oxley realization that many companies, particularly smaller ones, weren't properly implementing the monitoring component of COSO's 1992 Internal Control Integrated Framework as part of their efforts to comply with the required Section 404 management assessment of their internal controls over financial reporting.

COSO hopes the new guidance, which will include examples and illustrations of effective monitoring, will help companies use their existing internal control monitoring to support their Section 404 assertions. Many companies had been layering year-end monitoring efforts on top of existing monitoring efforts. The guidance is also supposed to complement 2007 efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to ease the burden Section 404 compliance with guidance for management and a revamped standard for auditing ICFR.