CEO@BizTechNet.org
Unfortunately, the collective software and copyright enforcement groups do, indeed, have the right to audit your companies. (Please review your licenses for a "Right to Audit" clause--nearly every license has one.) More importantly, we have found that the vast majority (as in 80%+) of enforcement audits are targeting small- to medium-sized enterprises. These are the same SMEs that pay the highest amount for each software product while being pushed into the least favorable license agreements.
The most useful and cost effective answer to all of the posts in this thread is that virtually any business, of any size, can learn to monitor its own compliance by sending one person to a single +/- four day asset management course and at considerably less cost. The infrastructure you put in place to ensure compliance due diligence is the same as that required to monitor ROI for ALL of your technology assets--not merely the PC / MAC software that the enforcement industry players want you to monitor. You simply scale it up to higher levels of internal control.
The automated tools needed to perform all these proactive business process improvements can--and do--quickly pay for themselves (If you even REQUIRE an automated tool, which most SMEs do not.) And, as many of you have pointed out, there are plenty of very affordable automated tools available--you just gotta understand how best to make use of them.
The core issues behind all of this hype are that you are either controlling your entire portfolio of technology spending and utilization for yourself or the vendors (and/or their FAST / BSA-style friends) are going to do their best to come in and do it for you--for a nicely boosted fee. We've proven time and time again that you can regain as much as 25% of your existing technology budget while reducing ongoing tech costs by as much as 40% simply by exerting strong business process controls over tech spending. Or, you can keep sending your hard-won revenue to the IT suppliers for ever more onerous contracts, licenses, and services.
Got questions? Let us know and we'll do our best to provide cost-effective answers.