UPMC said yesterday it had become the first nonprofit medical system in the country to be certified compliant with the most stringent provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley, a 2002 corporate governance law designed to prevent mistakes and corrupt accounting.

Private and nonprofit organizations such as UPMC, the region's largest health-care system, are not required to comply with most of Sarbanes-Oxley, which was enacted in the wake of Enron and other corporate corruption scandals and requires public companies to install and monitor internal controls. But it's expected that such organizations will begin moving to become compliant under the assumption that the law eventually will become mandatory for nonprofits and private concerns, too.

UPMC was certified compliant by its external auditors, the Pittsburgh office of Ernst & Young, in audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended in June, which the health system released on its Web site yesterday.

The audited figures confirm preliminary results showing that UPMC earned a record profit of $523 million for the 12 months ended in June.

UPMC decided to go through what turned out to be a two-year certification process because of its standing in the community, Chief Financial Officer Robert DeMichiei said yesterday.

"With an organization of our size and importance in the community, we felt it was important to reach the gold standard and raise the bar as high as we could" for good corporate governance practices, he said.

The process also helped UPMC become more efficient by forcing it to accelerate the back-office integration of several recent acquisitions, he said.

The process cost between $1 million and $1.5 million, considerably less than the initial estimate of $6 million because the company was able to do most of the work in-house, Mr. DeMichiei said.

He said UPMC consulted with Ernst & Young and several other major auditing firms to conclude that it was the first nonprofit health care provider to receive Sarbanes-Oxley certification.